


Purgatory, director's cut

by runsinthefamily



Series: Purgatory [21]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Purgatory, emotional honesty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 20:01:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13302168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runsinthefamily/pseuds/runsinthefamily
Summary: I promised, long ago, to revise and expand my Purgatory series and consolidate it into one fic. Et voila.





	Purgatory, director's cut

**Though I walk through the valley**

When the leviathan pops like a blister and its muck floods the room, Castiel flings his wings out, searching for Dean, trying to shield him, save him. It’s futile, as so many of his attempts have been. Ink-black and clammy, leviathan essence closes around him and takes light, air, and reality away. He recognises the transit too late to do anything, if there was anything he could have done.

Dick claws at him, briefly. _Little bird, little angel thing, let me in again..._

Shock and horror. Castiel flails, calls his blade and scythes his wings and lands on the loam of a forest that is not a forest. He spins, his borrowed human heart pounding in his chest as though it could somehow assist him, as if adrenaline and human muscle and bone could do what they failed to do before. His control over his vessel is tenuous these days.

The leviathan is gone. Castiel draws his Grace in, searching it frantically for even a trace of tainted power. It is clean. Much tattered, much abused, but wholly his.

“Cas?”

He turns, dread threading through him. The light is dim and bluish, and it makes Dean look pale and sickly.

“Dean,” he says. “Dean, are you alright?” His Grace flits out, brushing the surface of Dean’s body, verifying his health. It bounces back from Dean’s soul, edges curling like dying leaves. He can feel the anger, the betrayal that still boils there.

“What the hell?” Dean asks. His head is on a swivel, marking shadows and movement, assessing their situation.

“A being as powerful as Dick – his passage was violent. It seems he drew us after him.”

“Oh, shit.” Dean’s voice is low and emphatic.

“Yes,” Castiel agrees.

“So this is ...”

“Purgatory,” says Castiel. The place is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Wisps and shreds of memory and knowledge float around in him, leftovers from his catastrophic overreaching for power. He doesn’t know this forest, but he knows the _feel_ of it, the unreliable slippery shift of it. It seems weirdly solid around Dean. He doesn’t like that at all.

“Cas.”

He follows Dean’s gaze to the treeline, where the shadows seem to be massing. Something makes an inquisitive, rough sound.

“Werewolves.” Castiel lets his blade slip back into his palm, tries to ready himself for combat. There is no room for his weakness, not here.

“That is not a werewolf,” says Dean slowly, as the first one steps out into the half-light. It is bestial and low to the ground, and Castiel can see why Dean is confused. “That is the love child of a wolverine and a lizard. With a really bad case of mange.”

“It’s been here a long time,” says Castiel.

The were screams at them. Spittle flies from its jaws. A chorus answers it from all around them.

Castiel feels Dean’s back connect with his, heat and faith and trust, even after everything. It bolsters him. “Don’t let them separate us,” says Dean.

“Never,” says Castiel.

The weres come at them from three sides, the largest feinting on the left to try and lure Castiel away from Dean and allow two others to attack his flank. Castiel declines to be drawn out, waits until the second were is close enough, and goes low, catching it under the jaw and using its momentum to heave it bodily over his head. He guts it as it goes, letting his blade catch and drag just enough that the intestines hit the forest floor and not Dean’s shoulder. He spins his blade into reverse grip and drives it down through the skull of the third were, using it as a handle to fling the body at the largest, coming in now for a real attack.

Dean grunts behind him and he spares a quick glance. One down on that side, coughing blood into the dirt. Dean is booting another in the ribs with enough force that Castiel can hear the crack of bone. The leg of Dean’s jeans is dark and damp below the knee.

Branches break and more howls sound further out. Some twenty or more, if he judges correctly.

“We need to go,” he says, and punches the largest were in the face, dislocating its jaw and splintering its teeth back into its throat.

“Where?” Dean shouts. Gristle pops and a were shrieks high and desperate.

“Anywhere not here.” The trees disgorge another wave of beasts.  Castiel grabs Dean by the shoulder and

 _stretches his wings out, making the space between_ here _and_ there _ripple and bend and fold and_

lands them in another dark corner of forest, this time with a sheer rock face to set their backs against. Dean jolts away from him, as he always does post-flight.

“Dammit, Cas.”

“Let me see your wound,” says Castiel, going to one knee in front of Dean.

“Yeah, shit, don’t wanna end up one of those – things,” says Dean.

“You won’t,” Castiel says absently, healing the ragged gash in Dean’s calf. “The curse is carried in saliva and blood. You are here in body, but they are only souls.”

“Their teeth felt pretty fucking real,” says Dean. He flexes. “Ow. You getting sloppy there, Cas? It still hurts.”

Castiel lays a hand over the healed bite, brow furrowed, searching with his Grace. Dean shivers a little. “Your flesh is healed,” Castiel says. “But – there is some damage to your soul.”

“Well, shit,” says Dean. “Cuz they were souls?”

Castiel nods. “It will heal, if more slowly. I can spare some Grace to –“

“Nah,” Dean interrupts. “I get the feeling we’re going to have to be firing on all cylinders if we want to get outta here in one piece.”

“Dean,” says Castiel, standing. “You should know, that isn’t likely.”

Dean levels a finger at his nose. “I don’t want to hear it.” He looks wild and battleweary, black leviathan goo and red blood spattered equally across his face.

“Whether you hear them or not doesn’t change the facts,” says Castiel. “It took a year of searching and experimentation to discover the spell that opened a portal into this place, and that was with the resources of an angelic legion and the King of Hell assisting me. Not to mention that it opened from the outside in. Purgatory is a prison, Dean. It’s likely there are no doors that open from this side.”

“Bullshit,” says Dean. “Resources of heaven and hell, spare me. You were cutting up low level creepy-crawlies because no one knows fact one about this place. Which, by the way, should have been a sign not to fuck around with it!”

Castiel clamps his mouth and eyes shut, trying to hang onto his composure. Dean’s anger beats against him like a storm, making him feel panicky and fragile. The barely healed edges of the damage that Sam’s hell-tainted memories had done to him crisp and wither with the heat of it.

“Cas. Cas!” Dean is there, one hand on his shoulder. “Hey, don’t – don’t fly away, alright? I – we don’t have to talk about what you – what happened.”

Castiel opens his eyes, sees green irises, sweaty freckled skin, feels the attenuation of Dean’s anger into concern and caring. Dean’s love, married always with barely leashed desperate fear.

“Just. Stay,” Dean orders. “We’re gonna need each another. Okay?”

“Okay,” says Castiel.

Howls, rising in the distance.

“Let’s not hang around for the rematch,” says Dean, glancing in their direction. Castiel spreads his wings again and Dean holds up his hands. “Whoa, whoa, do you actually know where you’re going? Maybe we don’t jump willy nilly around the monster afterlife?”

Castiel folds his wings away, slowly. “How did you know I was about to fly?”

Dean blinks at him. “I, uh. Don’t know?”

“Well. Regardless. You have a point.”

“Shank’s mare it is.” Dean steps away from the rock face.

“There are a few things I do know about Purgatory,” Castiel offers. “When I was host to the leviathan, some things … leaked.”

“That sounds uncomfortable,” Dean says.

Castiel represses a shudder. “Yes. It was. But useful now, perhaps.” He looks up. “Directions mean little. Intention is more important.”

“So, forget finding North,” Dean says. “We, what, wish our way out?”

“As I said, out may not be a possibility. But,” he says, forestalling Dean’s response, “we can perhaps orient ourselves toward wisdom.”

“Someone here can help us? Someone here is going to be _willing_ to help us?”

“It’s the best I can offer,” says Castiel.

Dean squares his shoulders. “Alright. Let’s intend the fuck out of here.”

**As I scan this wasted land**

Purgatory is not just the forest. Sometimes they slip sideways into deserts, stretching flat and grey beneath a moonless sky. There is a river, sometimes, cutting black and swift between rocky cliffs as pale as bone. Dean does not need Cas’s warning not to drink.

Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, there are buildings. A whole city, once, rain-washed streets and flickering neon signs, where all the doors were locked and all the windows opaque as a cataract. Cas hurried them through, his wings flaring protectively, which, another weird thing, how Dean is starting to be able to sense when Cas is flexing his angelic muscle.

Everywhere they go, monsters are waiting.

Dean has killed more bump-in-the-nights since they landed here than in his whole previous hunting career. Although killed is perhaps not the right term, since they only shudder and collapse and then get up again, if you give them long enough. That was downright disturbing, in Dean's opinion.

("What the hell, they can't be killed?" "This is Purgatory, Dean. They are already dead. There is nowhere else for them to go.")

It is wearing on him, the endless violence, the way that his own wounds close up but still seemed to ache, so that he is always, always hurting. Occasionally, rarely, they come across a place that seems emptier than others, where they can breathe for a moment. He doesn’t sleep, doesn’t seem to need to, but sometimes he just needs to stop. Rest, inasmuch as that’s possible.

Right now, it is a house, a ruin that nonetheless seems friendlier than the forest they are making their way through. Cas pauses, head tilted back to observe the cupola at the top. The door sags open, revealing a shadowy interior.

Cas nods.

Inside, the white non-light spills through the windows in a way that almost seems normal. They make their way through empty rooms and hallways where the wallpaper peels in huge swaths and the plaster has fallen away from the lathes. There is a weird dry smell, something like old books and something like cloves. No dust rises at their footsteps.

“Cas,” says Dean and his angel stops, looks at him. “Is this - are we safe here?”

Cas considers, his eyes flicking ahead to a narrow stair that rises past a high window. Broken boards litter the floor. “No,” he says. “But safer.”

“Did someone used to live here?” Dean picks at the wallpaper. It was roses once, he can tell, but now there is nothing but a bare ghost of colour.

“I don’t know.” Cas leads on, up the stairs.

Above, there are remnants of furniture, tables and chairs and in a large room with a domed ceiling, a massive bedframe with the mattress still intact. A tangle of bedclothes lays across it, and in the center of them, a large, dark stain.

Dean presses a fingertip to it, draws it away dry.

“Blood,” says Cas briefly.

“Human?” Dean asks and then feels stupid.

“Unlikely,” says Cas.

Dean shivers and Cas moves in, wraps his arms around Dean and lays his head against Dean’s back. Dean relaxes minutely as warmth steals back into him.

“How bad is it?” asks Cas.

“Not too bad,” Dean says. “Couple minutes should do.”

“By which you mean, you should have said something long since, and will now need twice as much,” Cas responds.

Dean makes a small, irritated noise and carefully, skittishly, lays his hands over Cas’s where they are folded together on his ribs. The warmth intensifies. Tears prick Dean’s eyes, as they always do.

Purgatory. Fucked up place. No need to eat, or sleep, or any of the other bodily bullshit, but he can’t go half a day without a hug.  _Grace transfer_ , as Cas calls it, which is better than his first label,  _bodily communion_. First shakes, then dizziness, then cramping and chills and it was only because Cas thought he needed physical warmth that they’d discovered what the cure was.

“This is not a place for humans,” Cas had said, tucking Dean’s trembling hands together against his chest and wrapping all his angelic limbs around Dean’s shuddering body.

“So w-what?” Dean had managed. “I’m allergic?”

“As good a metaphor as any. Now stop speaking.”

In a way, it had become something to depend on. In the absence of regular day/night cycles, or the need to sleep, their stops to hug it out lent a kind of rhythm to their travel. And Dean, though he would never admit it, looks forward to it with the sad eagerness of a starved puppy. For all the horror and struggle and death, this is the longest period of time that Cas has ever spent with him and it feels good, having him there. Standing there in the weird abandoned bedroom, eyes shut, fingers gripping Cas’s a little too tightly, the solid presence of Cas along his back is like an anchor. The one thing left that is real, dependable.

When he opens his eyes again, the bedroom has shifted into a cave, low and damp. And occupied.

“Shit, we did a slip!” he says, groping for his knife.

Cas is already wheeling away, wings snapping open, angel blade bright in his hand.

 _Vampires_ , Dean thinks, or maybe something else. Nothing looks the way it did back in the world. Here, everything is stripped down to its essential nature. Teeth and claws and whip-fast lean muscle. He can hear the rustle of coat and feather as Cas lets loose behind him. Shadows move, and he lets instinct take over, feels the knife catch and drag, feels the wind of a missed strike buffet his hair.

 _I liked that house_ , he thinks, absurdly, and then he kills, and kills, and kills.

**And would not let him go**

Touching Dean is difficult. Even before everything, back when they were Righteous Man and Angel of the Lord, reluctant allies in a battle neither of them truly understood, Dean had made the palms of Castiel’s vessel itch. Castiel has laid hands on Dean many times, to transport, to heal, to communicate companionship. To shield him, and pull him from danger, and, yes, commit violence upon him. None of it was as hard as simply, quietly, holding Dean in his arms.

Dean is stiff and reluctant. Castiel ignores his own aching awkwardness, his uncertainty, and uses their proximity to cradle Dean’s soul with his Grace. Dean’s soul yields marginally, taking tiny shreds of energy and warmth, while Dean mutters about monsters “peeping from the bushes” and “we are never telling Sam about this, y’hear?”

“Keep your hands above the waist,” he says once and then flushes a brick red that Castiel is surprised he has the energy for, given how pale and shaky he’s allowed himself to become.

Castiel enfolds him. “I don’t know what that – oh. Sexual contact.”

Dean rears his head to the side, taking his ear away from Castiel’s mouth. “Dude!” he complains. “Can you not – while we’re – don’t say shit like that!”

“Stop squirming,” says Castiel, exasperated, and reels him back in.

Grumbling, Dean submits.

**Leave the path that led me to that place**

Paths, roads, walkways, even the barest of trails, all these things are dangerous.

“They are invitations,” says Cas. “And we should not accept.”

Which is fine, in theory, but leads to a lot of scrambling and cursing and then fighting in brambles and bushes and among trees packed so tight that Dean can’t get a good swing on anything and ends up falling over more often than not. Cas, of course, flows among the obstacles like water. Doesn’t so much as snag his stupid coat.

“You are a creature of civilization,” Cas says, offering him a hand up across the fallen tree that had treacherously crept up behind his knees.

“I’ve taken down my share of wildlife,” Dean says, irritably. “This forest has it in for me.”

“Likely true,” says Cas.

“You’re a real comfort in my time of need, you know that?”

Cas cups a hand around the back of Dean’s neck and presses their foreheads together and Dean exhales, feeling warmth and ease creep along his limbs. This close, even in the darkness, he can see Cas’s eyelashes, the fine crinkles at the corner of his eyes, the delicate line of bone and cartilage along his nose.

“Ok, I’m ok,” he says, without heat, and pushes away. “Let’s keep going.”

It gets more difficult, thickets and deadfalls and swampy, pitted ground that challenges even Cas. Dean stumbles over a rock, puts his hand down in a patch of twining plant growth to catch himself, and can’t lift it again. Green has enveloped his fingers, hugs his wrist.

“Cas?” he says, schooling his voice away from panic. “Got a problem here.”

It takes them nearly five minutes to cut him free of the tangling vines and when they finally stagger away, Dean has welts from elbow to fingertips.  The space beneath the trees is getting darker when, suddenly, they break through another grasping fence of branches into what can only be described as an avenue. Faint mist obscures the distance. Above, the trees weave together, stark and bare against the sky.

“Cas?” Dean asks.

“I don’t know,” says Cas. It’s his second most common turn of phrase, right behind  _we should move on._

“I don’t see that we have much of a choice.” Dean looks back, sees the gap they’d torn with their bodies has already closed up.

“Yes,” says Cas, and pulls his blade.

Dean follows suit. “Left or right?”

Cas closes his eyes and Dean’s skin tingles, all the hairs on his neck and arms standing up.

“Shit,” he mutters, rubbing at his forearms.

“Left,” says Cas and looks at Dean. “You felt me exert my will.”

“That’s what that was?” Dean rolls his shoulders.

Cas knits his brows. “I don’t like this. Your increasing perception of my angelic self is dangerous.”

“My eyes aren’t boiling just yet,” says Dean. “Let’s go.” He turns left and moves on, his angel at his back.

**Therefore wisdom and knowledge will be given you**

They slip twice while on the road but while the landscape changes, the road does not. A clanging, awful confusion of rusted machinery swims into being around them and then melts into moors, blue and heathery. A hut rises out of the brackish water to one side and, in it, firelight.

Castiel gestures Dean back with a hand and steps to the open doorway.

“Well.” The thing inside looks up. It is man shaped but fire burns in its eyesockets and the ground is smoking where it sits. “The angel. That’s unexpected.”

“I don’t know you,” says Castiel, warily. He didn’t think there was a denizen of Purgatory that he wouldn’t recognize. He’d held them all in his Grace, after all. They’d been _part_ of him, their power a constant, intimate thrum –

The thing spits to one side and its saliva hisses and pops. “There were a few of us you missed, Big Gulp,” it says. “Let the human by, he looks cold.” It flexes its fingers. Heat comes off them in waves.

“Phoenix,” says Castiel.

“Good eye,” says the phoenix.

“This the guy we’re intending toward?” Dean is at Castiel’s shoulder.

“I believe so,” says Castiel. “You’ve been here a long time,” he says to the phoenix.

“Since nearly the start,” says the phoenix. “Mama never did like us much. When I was born, she didn’t wait a minute, just chucked me out of the nest, all naked and alone. Met an angel.” It smiles and heat pours out from behind its teeth. “Didn’t go well.”

“No angel blade could,” Castiel begins.

“Name of Gabriel, if I recall,” says the phoenix. “And lo, we battled for three days and nights, and mountains were laid low in our wrath. Tricky motherfucker got me in the end, though. Special sword, forged while a comet passed overhead.”

Dean hits Castiel on the arm, eager. “Like the Colt!”

“So you know Purgatory well,” Castiel says.

“Oh, I know what you’re going to ask,” says the phoenix. “Same thing everyone does. And I’ll tell you. Why not? Won’t do you any good.”

“We’re looking for a way out,” Dean says.

The phoenix eyes him. “Well, if he can’t be smart, at least he’s pretty.”

Castiel puts a hand on Dean’s wrist, preventing him from pulling his knife. “Why would you share your knowledge with us?”

“Because I’m not supposed to,” says the phoenix. “Because Mama wouldn’t like it.” It spits again. “Three ways lie before you, travelers, each with its peril. The ring of fire, the endless fall, the maw of the beast. The ring is closest. The other two are in the basement.” It points a finger downward.

“And we can pass through these gates?” says Castiel.

“Sure,” says the phoenix, and its eyes flick to Dean. “Resources you have, you could do a lot.”

Castiel pushes Dean backward again and shifts his wings a little wider.

The phoenix laughs. “Oh, angel,” it says. “Keep ‘em holstered. I been down here too long to care. You have to know that pretty much everyone else you meet is going to want a bite of that, though, right?”

“Why won’t it do us any good to know about the gates?” Dean demands. “Goddammit, Cas, stop shoving at me.”

“Because,” says the phoenix. “You’re going to die. And only the living can leave Purgatory.”

**The apples of the valley hold**

They turn a corner in yet another labyrinth and the colour smites Dean’s eyes. He hears Cas inhale beside him.

“Cas, what -?” It is staggering, the sheer richness of the red, the thick carpet of leaves beneath the tree, the bunched glory of the foliage that still clings to the branches. After the unknowable time they’ve spent here with nothing but washed out drab everywhere they look, the sight of the tree is almost painful in its intensity.

Cas takes a step forward, reaching out a hand. His eyes are wide, his mouth open a little. “It’s an Eden tree,” he says.

“What, like, the garden? The apple and all that?”

Cas keeps on going until his hand is pressed against the gnarled black trunk. “This is a cutting from Joshua’s garden,” he says. “I can feel the echo of heaven in it.” He shuts his eyes and tilts his head back. A single, blinding-red leaf drifts down onto the collar of his coat.

“What’s it doing here?” Dean asks. The leaves are carpet-thick beneath his feet, yielding a strange sweet smell when crushed.

“Joshua must have planted it.” Cas glances at Dean. “Eons ago.”

“So - is this a safe place?”

“No,” Cas says, sorrow in his eyes. “Only a beautiful one.” He draws away, reluctantly. “We should move on.”

Dean catches the leaf as it slips off Cas’s shoulder, twirls it between his fingers, and then hands it to Cas just as they pass again into the grey-green damp of the labyrinth. Cas takes it, confusion in his eyes.

“To remember,” says Dean, shrugging a little.

Cas dips his head and tucks the leaf into a pocket. “Thank you, Dean.” The shadow of his wings flare against the stone/wood tangle of the walls about them and Dean blinks at their almost bashful shuffle and when had he started to be able to read Cas’s wings?

Cas glances at him, and then the shadows are gone and Cas is lifting his eyebrows just a little, almost like a challenge.

“Let’s, uhm,” says Dean and then the air changes, the way it does when a shift is coming. Cas lifts his blade and Dean drops into a crouch and the moment is swept away.

**They shall hunt them from every mountain**

They draw attention, no matter how quietly they attempt to move. Dean stands out, vivid and astonishing against Purgatory’s half-reality. Every shift throws them, if not directly into battle, then in close proximity to enemies. They are tracked, relentlessly, and Castiel’s attempts to disrupt the trail they leave by short flights seem of little use.

Worse, any use of his Grace seems to attract a different kind of attention. Nothing that he has seen, yet, only felt. Not through mortal senses, but as a pressure against his divine self, a whisper he can hear in his Grace. It sharpens and builds the more he flies, each time he heals Dean.

“What is it?” Dean pauses in wiping down his blade. “You’ve got that look again. Do you hear something?”

Castiel surveys the dusky-red ten-foot high stalks of corn that surround them. Dean had made a joke about children when they’d emerged here that Castiel had not understood. “No,” says Castiel. It isn’t a lie. Technically.

“Liar,” says Dean. “Fuckin’ spill, man, I don’t wanna be surprised when whatever it is comes at us.”

“I don’t know what it is,” says Castiel, relenting. “But I feel something. And it feels me.”

“Kinky,” Dean says, but his brow is furrowed.

“It knows I’m here.”

Dean steps closer to him, gaze moving restlessly outward. “Like, here in Purgo-land or here, here, like this spot right here?”

“I think,” says Castiel, and then the feeling spikes and he gasps a little, his Grace flaring defensively.

They come through the corn like dark, twisted shadows, silent and intent. Their faces are featureless other than their silver eyes. They are lean and long and their fingers are clawed and he knows what they are.

When the first dodges Dean’s knife and claws at Castiel, he feels the strike down into his very core. He panics, seizes Dean’s shoulder, and flings them into flight without thinking.

They hit hard as they land, and go rolling across rocky ground, Dean cursing a steady stream, Castiel clutching at him. Castiel feels that pressure still locked on him and, desperate, he flies again, ignoring Dean’s indignant shout.

They flash into an echoing warehouse, _still_ that pressure, he flies again, and again, past a beach and then a howling knot of werewolves fighting what look like striga and then into a rattling stand of bamboo, where Dean hauls off and punches him square in the face.

It doesn’t hurt but it’s enough to shock him out of his singleminded effort to _get away_. He lets Dean go and they stagger apart, both panting.

Dean shakes out his hand, grimacing. “What – what the _hell_ , Cas?”

Castiel turns in a circle, sensing. There are none close now, though their focus is unbroken. “We needed to escape.” He can hear the tremor in his voice, clamps down on his vessel’s autonomic system. “They were capable of –“

“Cas,” says Dean, and his voice is changed. “Cas, you’re …” He steps over, pulls aside Castiel’s coat, and reveals his torn and bloody shirt. Light spills through the rents.

“Yes,” says Castiel. “They wounded me.”

“Like, you-you? That’s –“

“My Grace.” Castiel puts a hand to the spot, heals his vessel. He can still feel the slow seep of Grace, though it no longer shows physically. That will take longer to mend.

“Shit.” Dean puts a hand on his arm. “Sorry for hitting you, man.”

Castiel has to laugh at that, a little. “You can’t hurt me, Dean.”

Dean gives him a look. “We’ve hurt each other plenty,” he says. “I don’t wanna do it anymore.”

“We should keep moving.” Castiel waves off Dean’s protest. “I will be fine.”

“Do we need to stay on the Angel Express?” asks Dean, resignedly.

“No, that’s actually not a good idea, now that we are away,” says Castiel. “I think they are tracking me through my Grace. The less I use it, the better.”

“Cas,” says Dean. “What the fuck are they? They weren’t even attacking me, they just wanted at you. Were they – is that what leviathan look like down here?”

“No,” says Castiel. He is weary, and afraid. If take him down, if he dies here, what happens to Dean? “They were nephilim.”

**Oh know I feel so strange looking out the door**

“That’s the gate?” Dean asks. His breath steams out in the air, though as usual he feels neither hot nor cold, regardless of surroundings. In the distance, across a deep rift in the ground, a charcoal tower of smoke rises against the purple sky. Lightning stabs inside it, a constant strobe of spiderwebbing light.

“So it seems,” says Cas.

“Can’t you, I don’t know, fly us through? You know, really quick?”

“No,” says Cas, shortly. “It would render you into atoms.”

“That fucker lied to us,” Dean mutters.

“He did not,” says Cas.

“He says we could get out this way!”

“We forgot to specify that we wished to survive the trip,” says Cas.

“Yeah, well.” Dean rolls his shoulders, grits his teeth. It has to be said. “You might.”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Cas. “I won’t go without you.”

“If you get to the other side, you can - it’s easier from out there, remember? You can do that spell again, the one you used to supersize yourself, and -“

“No,” says Cas and turns his back on the portal. “We will find another way.”

“Cas, dammit. Stop.” He catches Cas’s arm, turns him. “Listen, we have to think rationally.”

“I am,” says Cas. “I won’t leave you here. There is the possibility of time slippage, and you can’t survive long here without me.”

“But if you do the ritual right away -“

“I have chosen this duty,” says Cas. “I will not abandon you.”

That one hurts. “Duty?” asks Dean. He smiles and it feels tight on his face. “We might be in purgatory, but I’m not your fucking penance, Cas.”

“That is not what I meant.” Cas pins him with that angel-blue stare but Dean’s gotten pretty used to it over the years, even the high-octane version he’s getting now.

“What did you mean, then? Because I don’t need a nanny. I don’t know if you noticed, but it isn’t me those neph-whatever keep sniffing after.”

“If I keep my Grace tamped down -“

“Yeah, how’s that working out?” Dean jerks his chin at the shadows gathering around Cas’s shoulders. “Having some problems, I think.”

“Why is it such a burden that I wish to look out for you?” Cas snaps. “We are stronger together than apart, and I owe -“

“I don’t wanna be a debt you’re paying, man!” Dean says.

“You never listen to what I’m saying,” Cas says. He reaches out and grabs a fistful of Dean’s shirt. “I will  _not_  leave you.” His wingshadows grow brighter. “I don’t _want_  to leave you. And if it is a choice between freedom without you or eternity in Purgatory by your side, then I have already _chosen_.”

Light flares behind him, white and blinding as the sun. The electric smell of ozone is in Dean’s nostrils, every hair on his body stands straight out. A great buffet of wind blows his hair back, whips Cas’s trenchcoat about both their legs and through the watering of his eyes he sees them. Fire and lightning and crystalline feathers spread wide, refracting glory.

They vanish and Dean is left blinking in the sudden darkness.

“No, no, Dean.” It is Cas, holding him upright with an ungentle grip on his shoulders. “Dean, Dean, are you alright? Dean?” A thumb at one of his eyelids, rolling it back. “I’m sorry, I - Dean. Dean!”

“Ok, alright,” he manages, pushing at the hand on his face. “Jeez, back off. ‘M fine.” Vision is returning, though he sees spots swimming everywhere.

Cas draws a huge, shuddering breath. “I am sorry,” he says again. “My control is not - I should not have gotten so agitated.”

“Dude,” says Dean, suddenly, awed. “Those were your wings. Like, for real.”

“Yes,” says Cas. He eases Dean down to sit on the ground. Snow crunches beneath them.

“And I’m not blind.”

“No thanks to me,” Cas says.

“What - why not? I mean, not complaining, just … “

“I don’t know,” says Cas.

“Well, next time I’m wearing sunglasses,” says Dean, blinking hard. The spots are fading, slowly. “Can’t convince you to go, can I?”

“No,” says Cas. “You can’t.”

**Knit to the soul**

They are sitting against a low stone wall, part of an endless winding crosshatch of walls that stretches as far as the eye can see. Dean is hunched over, picking at the dirt beneath his nails. Castiel is pressed up against him, one arm over his shoulders, sharing Grace as carefully as he can. There are nephilim here, somewhere, though not close. If he can keep his efforts small and slow, they may escape notice. It means holding Dean longer, of course.

Dean shifts a little. “Doing okay?” he asks. A rugaru got through a few fights ago and savaged Dean’s left forearm. The discoloured stain on his soulstuff there makes Castiel want to hunt the thing down and tear it apart all over again.

“We’re fine,” says Castiel. “If we can find the door into the next level, we should leave them behind.”

“The nephews?”

Castiel sighs. He wishes he hadn’t explained the nephilim so clearly. “Angels are not family in the way that you understand. Those who fathered or mothered the nephilim aren’t my sibling relatives, which makes –“

“Okay, alright, calm your feathers.” Dean is smirking a little. It makes Castiel want to shake him. “They won’t be a problem, is what you’re saying.”

“We will leave them behind. The rest of the common beasts, as well.”

“So, what’s down there, then?” Dean, perhaps unaware, tucks his elbow slightly behind Castiel’s waist and into the feathers at the base of Castiel’s wing. Castiel shivers a little at the sensation.

“Higher beings,” he says. “Souls of dead Alphas. Other creatures that walked the earth before humanity.”

“What, like dinosaurs?”

He doesn’t dignify that with a direct response. “If we can, we should avoid them.”

“Dodge the dinosaurs, check.”

“They won’t be as drawn to you. I think. Most won’t even know what you are, their kind was long dead by the time your ancestors came along.”

“Yeah, Ray Harryhausen got that all wrong.”

Castiel sighs. “They aren’t dinosaurs, Dean.”

Dean subsides and his soul withdraws a little, going hard at the edges. “You’re talking about Eleanor’s people.”  

“Her kind, yes.” Castiel looks up, where the leaden sky of Purgatory hangs heavy and low. “Though I wouldn’t call them people.”

“She seemed nice enough to me,” Dean says, and then sighs. “Not trying to start a fight, honest –“

“She didn’t kill anyone,” says Castiel. “Not directly. If you had looked at the number of her students who ended in psychiatric institutions or dead by their own hand, you may have had a different opinion of her. It didn’t strike you as odd, Edgar Poe and his dinner guests, all dead by various maladies and misadventures?”

“She was Bobby’s girlfriend,” Dean says.

“Bobby,” says Castiel. “Paranoid, reclusive, alcoholic Bobby? It was lucky for him they weren’t together long.”

Dean stiffens and then blows out a breath. “Okay,” he concedes. “So she was a monster.”

“I’m not saying she meant to,” says Castiel. “I’m saying that she didn’t belong on earth. With humans. Her very proximity was harmful.”

“And we’re about to go visit her home town.”

“If we can find the door.”

“Hey,” says Dean. “I’m intending my ass off, here. I don’t know what the holdup is.”

Castiel sighs, again, and tucks Dean in closer.

**In the light you will find the road**

“Cas!” Dean shouts, kicking another vampire in the teeth. They’re surrounded, this spur of rock was a bad fucking idea, and he can see more of the goddamned things massing in the ravine.

“I can’t risk it,” Cas shouts back. He staggers into Dean’s back and Dean braces a foot just in time to keep them from both going down. His boot skids on a slick of blood and then catches and then Cas’s weight lifts off him and there’s a terrible piercing screech from another vamp caught on the angel blade.

“You gotta!” Dean punches a vamp in the face - ow, fangs - cuts another across the belly, and goes down under a third, left forearm jammed up against its neck to keep it from his throat. The jaws gnash together a couple of inches from his nose and he grimaces. Fuckers are ugly enough on the other side, here they are  _repulsive_ , all eyes and wrinkles and teeth.

A scuffed once-white tennis shoe connects with the side of the thing’s head and it goes spinning away.

“Shut your eyes!” Cas says and clamps a hand to Dean’s shoulder.

Dean shuts his eyes. The black blossoms into red as Cas lights up and then there is the sickening sideways twist of Angel Airways, dizzying and horrible through the non-space that is Purgatory.

Dean lands on his feet, stagger-steps forward and then throws up bile. Other side effect of not eating - dry heaves. He coughs, spits, and then looks up.

A massive tree, as big as a California redwood, spikes into the sky. Spread eagled across it is a girl, naked as the day she was born. Vines hold her against the trunk of the tree, a thick web of tendrils and leaves. They crisscross everywhere, even over her forehead and chin, holding her head tipped back. Her eyes stare blankly upward. Only her hands are free. One of them twitches.

“Fuck,” he says, involuntarily. “Uh, she’s alive, should we -?”

“They all are,” says Cas and Dean looks away from the girl.

It’s a forest of giant fucking trees, each with their own hood ornament. Naked bodies as far as the eye can see.

“What the hell?” Dean says.

“Dryads, I think.” Cas leans in toward the nearest, a young man with pecs like a bodybuilder.

“Well, that’s not good,” Dean says. “Dad tangled with one in Oregon once.”

“They’re dormant,” says Cas.

Dean eyes the girl. “This one is twitching.” Her mouth is moving now, as well as her fingers.

“It’s your presence,” says Cas. “I did tell you.”

“Yes, alright, out of the frying pan and all that.” Dean is backing away. “Any ideas on the best way to start running?”

“One foot in front of the other?” Cas suggests and Dean nearly chokes.

“That was a joke. You -  _now_  you’re making jokes? You’re making jokes  _now_?”

The girl’s eyes shift, land on Dean, widen.

Cas grabs Dean’s arm and begins to run. “It wasn’t funny?”

“No!” Dean runs three steps and then laughs. “What the hell, man?”

Cas grins at him, shy and pleased.

There is a terrible tearing sound behind them, followed by an unearthly shriek.

“Seriously!” Dean says.

Cas laughs, that weird little chuckle Dean remembers from the mental hospital, a fucked up sound if he ever heard one, and it makes him laugh harder, two loons running through a goddamned monster funhouse together.

 _Holy shit_ , Dean thinks. _I think I’m happy._

**Come to the grave in full vigor**

If there is one aspect of this ordeal that is a reassurance it is that Dean is not aging. He feels no physical need for nourishment, which would have been impossible to provide, he doesn’t sleep, and the cells of his body have ceased to degrade. He is alive, still, but not _living_. It’s this paradox that causes the chills and shakes, Castiel is sure. It’s possible, if they are not separated, that Dean could remain here in Purgatory until the end of existence and never die.

This is both horrible to contemplate and a source of comfort. If, as Castiel is beginning to believe, there is no way out that won’t kill Dean, he can at least keep him safe, here.

Whether his mind will take the strain is another question. Humans are nearly infinitely adaptable, but they are not – not in their physical bodies, anyway – built to withstand eternity.

Dean, slogging through the knee high black grass in front of him, glances back, squints a little. “Are you contemplating doom again?” he demands.

Castiel’s mouth compresses a little. Dean’s new perspicacity is, on occasion, annoying.

Dean points at Castiel’s face. “Stop it.”

“I’m fine.”

“You aren’t.” Dean falls into step beside him and jostles their shoulders together. “Man, smile a little. Make another terrible joke, something. You’re bringing me down.”

“My apologies,” Castiel says, dry as desert sand.

“Better,” says Dean. “I prefer you snarky to sad.”

“Snarky,” Castiel says, wondering if there is any point in taking offense.

“Yeah,” says Dean. “You’re a sarcastic little shit, Cas, it’s one of my favorite things about you.” He grins, his teeth very white against his grimy skin.

Castiel is struck, not for the first time, by his beauty. His determination and courage and hope, here in this forsaken place. His faith, which against all reason and logic he has placed, again, in Castiel.

There is no warning. There is only a pale blur, which comes out of the grass to Castiel’s left and knocks him to the ground, and then the agony of nephilim claws as they tear into his shoulder and arm.

“Cas!”

Dean’s knife flashes and the nephilim is cast, shrieking, away. Dean is standing over him, flinging pale silver blood off the blade as his head turns, seeking. There are three of them, circling, but they are reluctant, somehow, to approach. One of them hisses and Dean feints at it, driving it back a step. “Don’t like that, huh?” he says, low and vicious. “Well too fuckin bad. You want him, you gotta go through me.”

Castiel sees the nephilim bend away, avoiding Dean’s gaze. It claws at the ground, agonized, and then rushes at Castiel, unable to stop itself.

Dean stabs it in the eye with a wordless shout and kicks the body off to one side. The other two wail, and, in the distance, are answered.

“Cas, I think, if you can, we better flap on out of here,” says Dean. He puts out a hand.

Castiel takes it, lets Dean haul him upright. “My hero,” he says, through the pain.

Dean barks a surprised laugh and Castiel unfurls his wings.

**Throw me a line if I reach it in time**

“Well,” says Dean. “At least it isn’t on fire.”

Cas leans his head back and looks up at the hole in the cavern wall. In the silver light from the portal, his glow is near-invisible. Dean can still feel it, though, a shivery tremble in the air. The hairs on his arm rise as Cas steps closer, a frown knitting his brows.

“There’s something - I think I should investigate before we go closer.”

“I’m not exactly going to be hiking up there, Cas,” says Dean, waving a hand at the gaping, bottomless-so-far-as-he-can-tell pit that separates them from the shining exit.

“True,” Cas says and then turns to Dean and hugs him, firmly.

Dean huffs a little in surprise. They are pressed chest to chest, Cas’s head on his shoulder, his ruffled dark hair tickling Dean’s jaw and ear. Cas’s hands are spread on his back, warm even through the layers of cloth. The smell of him is distinctly angel, ozone and dust and something like perfume, but sharper, like ancient spices. Dean hesitates and then lifts his own arms and closes them around Cas.

They stand there, while warmth and lightness travel along Dean’s limbs, while his heart lifts and his mind sharpens and even his breath comes easier. It is the longest they’ve held one another since that first night where they’d both thought he was dying and Cas had wrapped him up and muttered urgently in his ear to _hold on, Dean, don’t let go, don’t do this._ And they’d never done it this way, like an actual hug, like it was more than a necessary sharing of heat and whatever angel mojo Cas used to keep him kicking.

Dean lets out a shuddering sigh and drops his forehead onto Cas’s shoulder. There’s no one here to see, no one to laugh or judge or smack him in the back of the head and tell him to man up. Only Cas, who is … well, Cas. He can have this for a moment. Just for a moment.

“Dean,” says Cas, pulling away. His hands are wrapped around Dean’s biceps. “If I am going to do this, I should do it soon. We won’t be alone here forever.”

“Right,” says Dean and sways forward a little.

“Dean,” says Cas again. “Please focus.”

“Yes.” Dean shakes himself, feeling as if he’s just woken from a particularly awesome sleep. He hasn’t felt this good since - well, he can’t even remember. Before Purgatory. Before the Dick Roman bullshit. Before a lot of things. “What did you do?” he asks.

“I did nothing different,” says Cas. “I only held you and let my Grace reach out.”

“But I feel - different.” Dean bounces on the balls of his feet.

“The difference is in you, then,” says Cas. He glances away. His wings half flare and then tuck in again, tight and restrained. “I should go.”

“Yeah,” says Dean. He looks behind them, at the dark entrance of the warren. “Limited time, and all that.”

“Yes,” says Cas. He hesitates. “I will return,” he says.

“You better,” says Dean.

“You have my word,” says Cas. His wings open, huge and shadowed, and then flare into brilliance.

Dean has long since given up on trying to restrain the goofy smile the sight always drags out of him. “Awesome,” he says.

Cas smiles at him, spreads his wings wide, and then beats them once, powerfully, going airborne in a wash of wind and dust.

Dean shades his eyes and watches Cas shoot like a star across the dark expanse of the cave and blend into the glory of the portal. There is a moment where it flares brighter, reaching tongues of silver flame into the hollow black. They curl about Cas’s tiny, distant form and welcome him in.

Dean waits.

And waits.

There is no measurement of time in Purgatory other than the slow encroachment of cold and lethargy through his body, but he waits what feels like an hour and is probably more like ten minutes before it becomes too long.

“C’mon, Cas,” he mutters, shifting his hand on the hilt of his knife.

Dean steps to the edge of the crevice and looks down, trying to judge distances, to see the unknowably far bottom. Stupid to split up, stupid. Why had he let Cas go? He squints at the portal, hoping for a speck, for the familiar impossibility that is Cas, flying.

A growl echoes up the tunnel and he wheels, the fear winding instantly into hot readiness for battle. The growl trails off into high pitched shrieky laughter and he narrows his eyes. It is past time for these fuckers to have caught up to them. And, to be honest, they are probably going to be easier to deal with now that Cas isn’t here.

Lean pale shadows fill the gap in the rock and Dean steps sideways, away from the edge, his knife slipping into his hand. The shadow things hiss and jostle one another, shoving and pushing not to be the first in the rush. Dean grins, sharp as a shard of glass.

One of them screams, flexing its claws. The broken-branch remnants of leathery wings on its back rattle against each other. Then they are all in full voice, a cacophony to tear a man’s eardrums.

Dean laughs. “Come on, shitheels,” he says, spinning the knife. “Come and get some.”

They rush him. It’s ridiculously easy, without Cas to protect. They flinch from his knife, from his fists, from his gaze, even. Something about him hurts them, the same way that something about Cas makes them ferocious and bloodthirsty beyond reason. Dean rips through them like Cas rips through - well, everything else. One of them steps too close to the edge, misses its footing, and falls, howling, into the abyss.

There is a second’s pause while they all contemplate its possible fate. Then they are all trying to run, scrambling back toward the tunnel entrance, while Dean begins grabbing and throwing and kicking. Five more go over. The sixth and last seizes him by the shirt, its horrible white bone-fingers clutching with the strength of panic. Dean staggers, feels the rock fracture under his bootheel.

“Fuck!”

Falling is like a dream. He punches the thing in the face and it lets go, wailing. It tumbles away, somehow falling faster than him, and he looks up, seeing the edge of the cliff retreating, the silver glow of the portal growing tiny with distance. It doesn’t seem real.

 _Bottomless_ , he thinks, and then,  _I might fall forever_ , and then the panic kicks in. _Castiel!_

There is a bloom of white, far above. A thunderclap reaches him several heartbeats later. There is a point of light falling toward him, gaining on him by the second. He lifts a hand, fingers spread wide.

Cas takes his wrist, reels him in, and wraps an arm around him from behind, under his right armpit and across his chest to grip his left shoulder tight. “I have you,” Cas shouts in his ear.

There is a second thunderclap as he snaps his wings open. His hand closes painfully tight on Dean’s shoulder, his arm becomes a bar of iron across Dean’s chest. Dean’s breath is jolted from his lungs. He closes his eyes, possessed by vertigo and deja vu so strong that he nearly weeps.

When Cas lands on the relative safety of the rock again, Dean drops to his knees. Cas goes down with him, closing his wings away, hands cupping Dean’s face.

“Are you well?” Cas asks. “Have you taken injury?”

“What took you so long?” Dean tries for flippancy but the words come out naked with relief. He is still trembling.

Cas’ fingers move along his jaw, stroke the line of his neck. “At least it wasn’t forty years this time.”

Dean laughs once, a sound like a sob, and then scrubs at his face. “So. The portal. What’s the deal?”

“A trap,” says Cas. He looks up at it, his mouth set. “Like a pit of honey. And it nearly had me.”

“Nearly?”

“I heard your prayer,” says Cas. “It woke me from my stupor.”

Dean tightens his fingers and then realizes that he is clutching Cas by the wrists. “Good thing I fell,” he says.

“Don’t do it again,” says Cas.

“Don’t leave again,” says Dean.

“It was a bad idea,” agrees Cas.

**Greet one another with a holy kiss**

“Well,” Dean pronounces, looking up at the hundred foot sheer cliff. “Angel lift us up there or wait for a slip?”

Castiel eyes Dean’s pale cheeks. “Perhaps we pause first, and –“

“Right,” says Dean. “Good call.” He turns and steps toward Castiel, and his soul surges out ahead of him, meeting Castiel’s Grace and embracing it even before Dean comes into Castiel’s arms.

Castiel wraps him up, speechless.

Dean relaxes, loops his arms around Castiel’s waist, rests his chin on Castiel’s shoulder. All the while, his soul opens and opens, joyfully, easily, letting Castiel’s Grace sooth and bolster every part. Dean warms and sighs and lifts his face to look, bright-eyed, at Castiel. His breath gusts over Castiel’s chin.

“That was uh, quick,” he says and then flushes a bit. “I mean, thanks.” He disentangles, scuffs his feet. His soul lets go much more slowly, clinging and stretching and generally leaving Castiel feeling as though he is the one who needs to sit down for a while.

His vessel, he discovers with dismay, has developed an erection. It takes effort to redirect the blood flow and dispel the hormones flooding his system.

Dean, mercifully, seems unaware. He has craned his head back again. “Any idea what’s up there?”

“I don’t know,” Castiel manages.

“Wanna find out?” Dean grins.

“Yes,” says Castiel. He holds out a hand, desperately curious. When Dean reaches out to take it, his soul again leaps out ahead of his flesh and curls playfully around Castiel’s Grace.

Castiel laughs, unable to help it, and flings them upward.

**And now's the time, the time is now**

“How long have we been here?”

Cas knits his brows. “That question is - irrelevant, in many ways. Purgatory does not have time, as you understand it.”

“Okay, but my heart keeps beating, right? So - how many heartbeats have we been here?”

“I don’t know,” says Cas.

“You don’t know?” Dean stops dead, his boots digging into the powder-fine sand. “How can you not know?”

“You can’t keep time here, Dean, not by any method.”

Dean shuts his eyes and sticks two fingers against the steady throb of the artery under his jaw.

“Dean …”

“Shhh!”  _Three, four, five_  … he gets to eleven and then. He.  _Four, five …_  No, wait he already … wait. _Five. Four?_

“Dean.”

“Goddammit. Five. Six. Sev-en.” His voice wavers strangely on the last number. He has a moment of vertigo.

“Dean, stop.” Cas tugs at his arm, pulls his hand away from his throat.

He’s sitting on the ground, he realizes. “How … but we. The hugging, Cas, how do you know when I need -?”

“You tell me,” says Cas.

“How do I know? I mean, it lasts for a while, right?” Dean grips at his hair, which has not grown an inch their entire stay here. “How can we even have a conversation? Or memories? If time isn’t - this is hurting my head, man.”

Cas sighs. “Then don’t think about it.”

“Dude.” Dean shoots him a reproachful look. “Now I’m definitely going to think about it.”

Cas looks behind them, where the gentle warm wind was slowly erasing their footsteps. “You are a living human. To some extent, you impose yourself on the stuff that Purgatory is made of. Your will is powerful, fueled by the marriage between your soul and your body. You perceive things a certain way and, to some degree, they bend themselves to your perception.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Cas sits next to him, crosslegged. “Purgatory is not a place. It is a purpose, shaped by the will of God. Only one being in all of creation was given a similar will.”

“Humans,” says Dean. He stares upward at the spill of stars above them. “So, is this even really a desert?”

“Yes,” says Cas. “And we are crossing it. Because you will it so.”

“Are you getting cryptic on me, man?” Dean digs the heels of his hands into eyes that aren’t tired or dry or aching.

“You are the one asking questions with no answer,” says Cas. There is a thin edge of amusement in his voice.

“Okay, but you says, at the portal, the one with the fire, you says ‘time slippage.’”

“Short hand for a concept that has no equivalent in any human tongue.”

“God _dam_ mit.”

Cas is eyeing him again, this time speculatively. He draws a breath, pauses, and then nods once, shortly. “Tell me if this hurts.”

That was a phrase that Dean didn’t like in the slightest but, before he can protest, Cas opens his mouth and

**_SPEAKS_ **

“Oh,” says Dean, once his bones have stopped ringing like struck crystal. “Ok, that, that actually makes sense.”

Cas is smiling, a little smug, a little delighted.

“Wow,” Dean adds, unnecessarily.

Cas stands and offers him a hand up. Dean takes it and glances down at the weird crackling sound they are making as they move.

The sand around their feet has turned to glass in a streaky, uneven starburst pattern, the arms of which stretch out for dozens of feet in all directions.

“Dude,” says Dean. “How much more awesome are you going to get in here?”

“I am as I ever was,” says Cas. “It is you who is changing.” He reaches out, taps the curve of Dean’s left ear.

“Is that a good thing?” Dean asks, although the sense memory of Cas’s true voice is still vibrating like a song through his body, better than a thousand Magic Fingers.

“I don’t know,” says Cas. The ever-present light-rimmed shadows of his wings twitch a little, nervously.

“Well, personally, I don’t see any down sides,” says Dean. He wiggles a finger in his ear. “Eardrums intact. Not even ringing.”

Cas’s mouth curves on one side and his wings relax, unfurl a little. “I remember the gas station,” he says.

“Yeah, so do I. This is definitely preferable.”

“I’m glad.” Cas lifts his head, eyes narrowing. “There is a shift coming.”

“Yeah, I feel it,” says Dean. “Take it? Stay?”

Cas casts him a look filled with challenge. “I am interested to see the effect of my true voice on actual denizens of Purgatory. Now that we know you can hear it. Want to test it out?”

Dean looks down at the glass and then back up at Cas. “Fuck, yeah,” he says, pulling his knife.

Cas sets his shoulders, lowers his head, and flings his wings open wide. “ ** _Let them come_** ,” he says. The sand makes crazy squealing tortured sounds as it fuses. Then the world tips sideways and spills them into chaos.

Dean leaps to meet it, teeth bared in eager joy, and Cas’s battle cry is like a great wave that bears him forward.

**I will strike down upon thee**

“Man,” says Dean. “Shout a couple of striga into spaghetti and it’s like no one wants to say hi anymore.”

“I suppose it made an impression,” Castiel allows.

Dean eyes him. “We haven’t had to fight anything since. I’m almost getting bored.”

“I prefer you bored to bloody.” Castiel ducks under another rusted beam. They are walking through a ruined city, the buildings knocked to rubble, their skeletal structures naked against the sky.

“Who even built all this shit?” Dean complains. “Oh, wait, right, I did.”

“That’s an exaggeration,” Castiel says. “It’s not like there is formless darkness everywhere but where you walk. Purgatory has shape, and substance. It’s just – malleable, to you, in a way that it is not otherwise.”

“I still kind of think you’re full of shit on that one. May there be a strip joint,” Dean intones, waving his hands vaguely. “Oh look, nothing.”

“Your will is profoundly unfocused,” says Castiel.

“I think I’m offended,” says Dean.

“If we stay long enough, you may learn to do more.”

“Yeah, think I’ll pass.” Dean kicks a half-brick off to one side. “Cas, am I – changing?”

Castiel reaches out, as he has begun to do more and more, and soothes Dean’s soul with a caress of Grace. “Yes,” he says. “But you aren’t becoming less human.”

“So what am I becoming?”

“More deeply yourself, I think.” Castiel catches Dean’s gaze. “Be not alarmed.”

Dean laughs, a little. “Pulling out the classics?”

“If it ain’t broke,” Castiel shrugs.

Dean points at him, mock-accusingly. “I don’t think I’m the only one who’s different.”

“Dean,” says Castiel, “you have been changing me since the moment we met.”

**Met a man on the roadside crying**

“Ok, the fucking thing is following us.”

Cas glances to the side, through the blasted dead-tree debris, and contemplates the glowing blob. “I suppose it’s possible,” he allows. “It doesn’t seem to be hostile.”

“Since when is anything here not hostile?” Dean glares at the thing.

It hangs, quietly luminescent.

“That’s it,” says Dean, and tromps off through the trees.

“Do you think this is wise?” Cas asks, following. His wings arch to either side of Dean, shoving back branches and leaves and whole tree trunks to clear a path.

“Wisdom is overrated,” Dean says, marching forward.

Cas sighs, slices through a final deadfall with a flick of primary feathers, and tosses the bits aside like someone might brush crumbs from a table.

This close, it is apparent that the thing is smaller than Dean originally thought. It is an irregular sphere, a few inches in diameter, emitting a soft, yellow light that wavers just slightly, like candlelight. It hovers at chest level. He squints at it, trying to see the edges.

“I mean, what is it?”

“I don’t know,” says Cas. “Not a soul.”

“What the hell kind of monster would have a soul like that?” Dean asks. “No teeth, no claws. No unreasoning fury.” He reaches out a hand.

“Dean,” says Cas.

“I’m just gonna -” His hand is less than a foot away, bathed in that pretty light, when the thing blinks out of existence, leaving Dean momentarily blinded in the sudden dark.

“Ok, so it’s shy,” says Dean.

It shows up again as they are slogging through the snowy woods at the foot of a massive mountain. Harpies hiss and chitter above them, too wary of Cas’s fury to harass them, but too vicious and hateful to leave them alone. When the light blinks into being just ahead, the harpies take off in a shrieking mob, feathers and guano raining down.

“Gross,” says Dean. “Why are harpies so gross?”

The light glows gently at them, framed by a small grotto of trees and snow.

“Is it me, or does it seem -“

“Shy?” Cas asks, with a raised eyebrow.

“I was gonna say, hopeful?”

“Hopeful,” Cas repeats.

“I don’t know,” Dean says, shrugging. “Yeah. Hopeful.”

Cas eyes him. “Are you sure you aren’t projecting your own feelings upon it?”

“Hopeful? Me?” Dean jams a thumb into his own chest. “Have you met me?”

“You are currently attempting to escape from Purgatory, a realm that has no map, no rules, and no limits, by walking. You either have more hope than any other being in creation, or you are insane. And this team already has a ‘looney toon.’” Cas smiles, just a little.

Dean snorts a laugh.

The sphere pulses brighter for a moment and there is a brief, high-pitched hum.

Cas and Dean stare at it.

“Did it -” Dean says, just as Cas says, “That noise came from -“

The sphere blinks out.

It’s everywhere after that, always off to the side, sometimes so far out that it’s nothing but a wink of light in the distance, sometimes just a few steps behind them, keeping pace effortlessly, phasing in and out of obstacles. It makes it impossible to hide, but Cas is pretty goddamn visible in any case, and it isn’t as if they haven’t already says hello to every creepy-crawly that Purgatory has to offer.

“No, we haven’t,” says Cas.

“Right,” says Dean. “The levels thing.” He stares at the sphere, which right now is about twenty feet away, illuminating the side of a rusted-out tin shed. Something in the shed is growling, but more in a I’m-terrified-please-go-away sort of fashion than a I’m-about-to-try-and-rip-your-throat-out way. “Hey, maybe Lightbulb over there comes from a different level?”

“I very much doubt it,” says Cas.

“But you don’t know,” says Dean. “You don’t know what it is.”

“It seems too benign,” says Cas.

Dean casts him a sideways glance. Cas’ face has that pinched look again, the one that means  _I am remembering leviathan shit_. “Okay,” he says. “Time for a little scientific method.”

Cas tilts his head at Dean, the gesture that means everything and nothing and never fails to make Dean’s heart contract, just a little.

Dean clears his throat, looks at the sphere, and says, “Hi.”

**A light on my path**

It is Grace. It is a fragment of Grace, somehow still cohesive, somehow still resonant with heaven’s light. It orbits them, first loosely, and then tighter and tighter, until eventually he looks up and sees it tucked up under Dean’s collar.

“Don’t spook him,” says Dean.

“It’s not a him,” says Castiel.

It slips off of Dean’s shoulder and wanders over to Castiel where it bumps vaguely into his chest a couple of times. He extends his Grace toward it, wondering if it will be drawn in, and it bounces away again in a long arc that ends behind Dean’s ear.

Dean ducks his head away. “Eh, that burns a bit.”

“It won’t integrate,” says Castiel. “It should, there’s no reason for it to be out here.”

“Stop trying to eat him,” Dean says.

Castiel sighs.

“I think he’s trying to make friends.” Dean lifts a hand, hovers it near the scrap. “Damn, it feel like heat, but it isn’t really.”

“It won’t hurt you. Probably.”

“That’s a first. What’s it doing here, do you think?”

“Left behind,” Castiel says.

“So, angels were here.”

“So it seems.”

“But not now.”

“Not that I can tell, no.”

“Look!” Dean has his hand held out flat, palm up, and the scrap is hovering just above it. He flicks his fingers gently. The scrap bobs up and down in time with the movement. Has it gotten denser?

“Please focus, Dean.”

“Right, yeah,” says Dean. “Hey, I’m going to call him Lightbulb.”

Castiel sighs again.

**The next stop's underground**

“Oh, man, really?” Dean looks across the lake to where the walkway disappears into the water.

“We can go on looking, but I doubt other options will be any more palatable,” says Cas.

“This fucking place needs a makeover.” Dean steps onto the broken, crumbling stone. It shifts beneath him and he shoots Cas a look of silent reproach.

“It won’t fall,” says Cas.

“So you say.” Dean jerks his chin at Cas’s left wing, where a small ball of light clings between his feathers. “You sure about taking Lightbulb?”

“It’s - remarkably insistent about remaining where it is.” Cas spreads his wing out and gives it an experimental flap. The ball doesn’t shift.

“Now who’s anthropomorphising him?”

“Dean -“

“Yeah, yeah, lost scrap of Grace, no personality, no feelings. I still call bullshit on that, by the way. He was following us.”

“Grace is drawn to Grace,” says Cas.

“Lil dude was lonely,” says Dean and takes another step. “You coming, or what?”

Cas sighs. “Don’t ask stupid questions.”

“Going further in to get out.” Dean shakes his head. “I really don’t know about this.” He reaches the jagged spur in the middle of the walkway and pauses for a moment, looking down into the clear water. It is like looking down the side of a mountain range, bare rock falling into crevasses, the bottom unknowably deep.

“I will be with you,” says Cas.

Dean feels the warmth of his regard all along his back. “I know.” He starts walking again.

“Things may be different, down there,” says Cas, as they reach the end. Water laps at the toes of Dean’s workboots.

“What does that mean?” asks Dean, turning.

Cas reaches out a hand and sets it on Dean’s shoulder, over the old handprint scar. “I will be with you,” he says, again. His grip tightens, his jaw firms, and then he tips the two of them sideways into the water.

**Beside the still waters**

The passage is violent. Castiel envelops Dean in his Grace and shelters him from perceiving the transition but it is difficult shielding both his body and his soul. Castiel feels his vessel begin to shred and lets it, preserving its atoms as best he can. He can reform it, later. For a moment his control slips.

Dean sees the space between, where things are not, a sight that no human could possibly endure. A wail of fear erupts from him.

Castiel smothers his awareness immediately, completely. Too completely. Dean’s mind shuts down beneath Castiel’s frantic pressure and Castiel pulls back, cursing himself in Enochian. They tumble through the other side of the door, into the nebulous spaces of deeper Purgatory. He spreads insubstantial wings, halts their plummet.

Painstakingly, he begins the process of rebuilding Dean’s nervous system, his scattered psyche. It’s work he has done before, at least.

His own repairs can wait.

**And if you walk you're gonna get there**

For a space, Dean wanders. There is nothing but white, and the sensation of movement. When it occurs to him to fear, he screams. He can hear himself, dull and muffled, as though he is facefirst in a pillow. Cas, he screams. Cas.

I am here.

Where?

Be calm. I am with you.

The movement is rhythmic. A slow swaying. Dean looks down and sees his legs, his feet. He is walking. He has hands, which he brings up to his face. The whiteness frays a little, shows him white sand that gives beneath him, spills over the toes of his boots as his feet sink in. The sand has small dunes, ripples. Stones. He looks to the right and sees a massive beam of what looks like black iron running along the ground beside him.

Nothing looks quite … believable. And the white blurs and blots anything further away than about thirty feet.

**_“You are well. Your mind needed time to adjust.”_ **

He looks to the left and sees Cas.

He still has Jimmy’s face, mostly. It has grown hard and stiff. Simplified, like a marble statue. The eyes are the same, blue and intense and focused on Dean. The rest of him, though …

Castiel is composed of shifting plates of metal, folding confusingly in on themselves and each other with hushed, silken whispers. They form an irregular tower about ten feet tall that hovers just off the ground. He looks like a particularly expensive piece of computer graphic wizardry. He looks painfully real, in a way that even Dean’s own body does not.

“Dude,” says Dean, a little freaked out by how not freaked out he is. “Not that this isn’t cool, but I thought you said Chrysler building. Bit short, aren’t you?”

 ** _“This is not my true form_** ,” says Castiel. The lips of his mask/face/thing don’t move, and the human tones inside the angelic are nearly gone.

“What is it, then?” asks Dean.

 ** _“I can’t hold my vessel together in this place._** ” He sounds irritated.  ** _“When I tried to manifest as myself, this happened_**.”

“Shit. Are you okay?” Dean stops dead and reaches out a hand to where Cas’s immobile face hangs in front of the shifting metallic bits.

 ** _“I am fine,_** ” says Cas. “ ** _This is not painful. Simply inconvenient._** ”

“Okay,” says Dean. “Inconvenient. Right.” A thought strikes him. “Oh, crap, where’re your wings? Where’s Lightbulb?”

 ** _“Inside_** ,” says Cas. The metal bursts open like a slow-motion explosion, all the plates tumbling and arching through the air, and three pairs of wings, glorious as the dawn, unfold from the spitting, roaring fire that is revealed in his center.

“Holy fuck,” says Dean.

Lightbulb pops out as well, with a joyous little ‘sproing’ noise, and bounces off the sand at Dean’s feet, the same golden-white tennis ball of light he’d been before. Dean catches him reflexively.

Cas buttons up in an eyeblink, everything collapsing back together tidily. “ ** _You carry h - it, for a while_** ,” he says. “ ** _It was getting restless_**.”

“Okay, but,” Dean puts Lightbulb up on his shoulder, “carry him where? Do you know where we’re going? I was sort of out of it, there. For a while.”

“ ** _We’re following a path_**.” Cas’s maskface turns toward the iron beam.

“Okay,” says Dean, taking a breath. “Follow the Black Iron Road, got it. I guess that makes you the Tinman. But I’m telling you right now, I’m not being Dorothy.”

“ ** _Wizard of Oz_** ,” says Cas. “ ** _A fitting metaphor_**.”

“When did you ever see,” says Dean, and then stops in sudden realization. “Cas, how are we gonna hug?” Cas looks at him and Dean flushes red as fire. “I mean, fuck, I mean, with the Grace thing you do, to keep me ticking.”

Cas is silent for a long moment, the whisper-rustle of his plates the only noise other than the faint scrunch of sand as Dean shifts his feet.

“ ** _An embrace is not entirely needed_** ,” Cas says finally.

“What does that mean?” Dean demands.

“ ** _I can envelop you in my Grace without the need for physical contact_** ,” Cas says.

“Wait,” says Dean. “Wait, no, the fuck you say. What happened to  _tactile reassurance_? To _bodily communion_? Is this a Purgatory level thing?”

Cas hesitates, and it is so beyond weird that Dean can read him like this, can tell by the way his plates change their pattern of movement that Cas is nervous, and embarrassed, even a bit shamed. “ ** _No_** ,” he says. “ ** _Since the false gate_**.”

“What the fuck,” Dean says, taken aback. “Jesus, Cas.”

Lightbulb makes a distressed vibration against Dean’s neck. Cas’s plates slow and his mask droops a little, angling away from Dean.

Dean opens his mouth to say something about lying, something about trust and sharing and, and …  _Exactly how pissed are you, actually_? asks a voice in his head that sounds just like Sam.

“ ** _I’m sorry_** ,” says Cas. “ ** _Touching did make it easier to -_** “

“Whatever,” says Dean, spreading his hands. “Whatever, no big, just, you know.” He licks his lips, glances away. “If you want a hug, man, just ask for it.” He swivels on his heel and strides away, down the side of the beam, kicking up sand.

“ ** _Thank you, Dean._** ”

He looks sidelong at the collection of flying sentient metal plates and shakes his head. This is his life. Seriously. “You’re welcome.”

**Watch over your heart with all diligence**

“You seriously can’t stop?”

 ** _“If I concentrate,”_** says Castiel. **_“But I am finding that very difficult.”_**

If Dean had been a beacon in the previous level of Purgatory, down here he is a conflagration, an ongoing nuclear reaction. He bends and warps everything around him. Castiel finds himself turning toward him even when he doesn’t intend to. Reading Dean’s thoughts is the least of it, though it is the aspect that Dean seems to be most fixated on.

“Will everyone be able to?”

 ** _“No,”_** says Castiel, repressing the flare of jealous anger that accompanies that thought.

“So why you?”

**_“We are – attuned. I told you, since the false gate –“_ **

“Yeah, yeah,” says Dean. The fire of his soul is agitated, and Castiel can read the struggle between Dean’s endless longing for connection and his consuming fear of it.

 ** _“I am sorry this is difficult for you,”_** Castiel says.

“It’s fine,” says Dean. His thoughts, not nearly as easily parsed as he believes, are a confused fragmented shouting of involuntary recollections of pornography he’s watched, a quiet litany of all the reasons Castiel will eventually leave, and a mish mash of Led Zeppelin songs that he’s trying to mask the rest with. “I mean, it isn’t, and you, you keep concentrating, alright, buddy?”

Castiel begins to reply and then has to pause while his body resets itself again. He will never tell him, but it is Dean who is doing this, Dean’s emotions interacting with fluctuations in the unstable stuff that is Purgatory to wreak havoc on Castiel’s attempts to keep a coherent material form. It hurts, a little.

“Damn,” says Dean. “That’s – that’s actually kind of creepy, man.”

Castiel has reformed as a blank black obelisk. **_“It won’t last,”_** he says, resigned.

**All the warmth we can find**

 “ ** _Another Eden tree_** ,” says Cas, his head drooping down.  _Mourning,_  his wings pronounce.  _Sorrow._

“This one’s dead.” Dean stares through the sparse trees to the gnarled, leafless, broken thing.

Lightbulb sings out, a throb of pain, and Dean reaches out to cup a hand around him. Heat flutters against his palm.

Cas sighs but for once doesn’t tell Dean off for ‘carelessly shaping the ineffable.’ “ ** _Yes_**.”

“But Joshua planted it?”

“ ** _Long and long ago_**.” Cas turns away, his huge sloping shoulders shifting beneath the skin.

Dean tips Lightbulb off into the curve of a wing and trots a couple steps to catch up to Cas’s head. Currently Cas is about the size of a horse, with great soft cat paws, a lumbering bear-like body, and a face caught somewhere between human and lion. He is a dim, shimmery grey, which makes Dean paranoid about losing sight of him in the endless damn fog.

“How long we been here, and we haven’t seen a single, you know, inhabitant,” says Dean. “It’s making me uneasy.”

“ ** _They know we are here_**.” Cas shivers, minutely, is abruptly scaled like a fish, glittering and cold.

Dean puts a hand to Cas’s cheek, which has elongated subtly. He is more wolf than cat now. “Does it hurt?” Dean asked. “Cuz it looks like -“

“ ** _It doesn’t hurt_** ,” says Cas. “ ** _I just wish it would stop. It’s disconcerting_**.”

“I’m sorry,” says Dean, uselessly. It had to suck, your body changing channels on you without warning. Like puberty, times a thousand. He bites the inside of his cheek.

 _Resignation, amusement_ , says Cas’s wings.

“Stop reading my mind,” says Dean, automatically.

Lightbulb pings again.

“Laugh it up, lightball,” says Dean. “Any idea of when it might, you know, stop?” He misses Cas’s face. Well, technically, it was Jimmy’s, but Jimmy was long gone to heaven, leaving Cas the inheritor, as it were. And Cas inhabited it in a way that Jimmy simply had not. He’d been a nice enough guy, but on him, the blue eyes and plush lips and high cheekbones had been attractive but unremarkable. On Cas …

On Cas everything had been so much more.

 _Astonishment_ , says Cas’ wings.  _Pleasure. Gratitude._

Dean flushes brick red.

“ ** _I find your body beautiful as well_** ,” says Cas.

“Oh for god’s sake,” says Dean.

“ ** _It was a pleasant task, rebuilding it. I realize now that you would have preferred I leave the scars, but at the time, I wanted to make you perfect_**.”

“You left one scar,” Dean points out.

Cas’ wings twitch.  _Proud_? No.  _Smug_. ” ** _I did_**.”

Lightbulb sings out, a complicated trill that hangs in the foggy air, unexpectedly beautiful.

“What - what was that?” Dean asks, surprised. Lightbulb had restrained himself to single notes up until now.

”’ ** _As a seal upon your arm_** ,’” says Cas, also surprised. His wings snap open and then shut again. Lightbulb drifts off and slides in between Cas’s shoulderblades. “ ** _It is a quote from the Bible_**.”

“The Bible?” Dean asks. He reaches out and scoops Lightbulb up. Prickling warmth suffuses his fingers.

“ ** _The Song of Solomon_** ,” says Cas.

“Isn’t that the dirty part?” asks Dean and then wishes, very strongly, that he hadn’t.

Lightbulb sings it again, and then again, louder.

“Alright, alright,” Dean mutters. “We get it.” He sticks Lightbulb back into Cas’s wing, shoving him deep into the feathers to muffle the sound. Cas twitches at the contact and Dean snatches his hand away.

They walk on in silence for a while. The Eden tree falls away in the mist.

“Why?” Dean asks, finally. He rubs at his left shoulder.

Cas folds his wings tightly against his back. “ ** _I didn’t know, at the time. But now I think I did it out of pride. I wanted you to know that it was I who had saved you. And for any who looked upon you to know it, as well. Later - later I saw it more as a promise. That I would not abandon you, or your cause_**.”

“And now?” Dean asks, choosing for now to leave the issue of abandonment alone.

“ ** _We have been through much together, you and I_** ,” says Cas.

It isn’t really an answer but Dean nods just the same, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

**Set me as a seal upon your heart**

Castiel has known, for a long time, that he loves Dean. He even knew that Dean loved him. What he had not known, could not have perceived, was the bone-depth of that love. The power of it.

It is imperfect, strung through with anger and mistrust, crippled by Dean’s self-loathing and fear, but it is solid as a mountain and as immovable. Dean beams it at him continually, unknowingly, devastatingly. Dean, he knows now, will love him forever. Even through lies. Even through betrayal. Even though he injured Sam, a sin that Dean would not have forgiven any other being on any of the planes of existence.

He doesn’t know when it happened, or how. He only knows he is grateful.

**Our shadows taller than our soul**

"And what's with the fog?" Dean grumbles, leaning against Cas's side - currently smooth animate rock that pulsed with heat - to ward away shivers. Snow and ice hadn't bothered him back in Level One but for some reason this damp chill wound its way under his clothes.

" ** _As we go deeper, the stuff of purgatory will become less -_**  " Cas seeks for a word, " ** _\- tangible._** "

"What happened to me shaping reality?" Dean slings an arm over Cas's low, rolling shoulders and feels the warmth sink into his muscles. It's almost too warm, like resting his feet directly on a radiator, but he sinks into it, lets it permeate him. The shadow-and-light of Cas's wing unfolds and droops not-quite around him.

" ** _You are, still._** " Cas looks at Dean, his blue eyes nearly lost beneath a steep, craggy brow. " ** _It simply doesn't penetrate as far. Things are less orderly, here._** "

"That sounds a bit ominous."

" ** _This was Eve's demesne once,_** " Cas says.  ** _"She was ever a creature of chaos and creation._ "**

"This was Eve's place?" Dean looks around at the worn down tumbles of rock, the dry, grassless earth. "Wasn't she the head honcho here? You'd think it would be more impressive."

" ** _It was, when she inhabited it._**

There is only the barest warning, a faint scuffle of feet, and then humanoid shapes flit out of the fog, a stream of them, heading right for Dean and Cas. Dean yanks out his knife, pushes away from Cas. His front shirt pocket flare with sudden heat as Lightbulb stirs, roused by the abrupt jump in Dean's heartbeat. Cas swings his heavy head forward and lets out a grinding roar that shakes the ground and makes Dean's teeth vibrate together.

The shapes, clearer now, pay no mind to any of it. The first one reaches them, Dean hefts his blade, and then it whips by on the right.

Dean turns his head, watches it go by. It is a woman, almost, although her face is indistinct in a way that reminds him of weather-worn statues, all her features soft and blurry. She's wearing a cardigan and skirt and practical shoes, all of it as grey as the fog that birthed her. She doesn't so much as glance at Dean. And then she is gone, vanished into the haze again.

The rest of them, some twenty or so, do the exact same, rushing around Dean and Cas like river water around a stone. Dean stands still as the last fades away, letting his heart slow again. Lightbulb makes an inquisitive chime.

"Cas?" Dean asks.

Cas is looking into the fog after the apparitions, his head tilted to one side. No matter how strange his form becomes, there is always something that remains completely  _Cas_  about him. " ** _Ghosts_** ," he says at last.

"Ghosts," Dean repeats. "This is where ghosts go?" There is a sinking sensation in his gut. "I always thought that - I mean, ghosts are people, or they were, once. I thought they got to go where people go. Heaven." He grimaces. "Hell. Whatever."

" ** _I don't know what the rules are, Dean,_** " Cas sounds apologetic, and tired.

"Bobby?" Dean manages. "Is he down here, somewhere?"

" ** _I don't know,_** " says Cas.

"Goddamnit," says Dean. his grip tightens on the knife. "God  _damn_  it!"

Lightbulb pings worriedly.

" ** _We can look,_** " Cas begins and then cuts himself off, head flinging up, wings mantling.

Something shrieks, off in the grey ahead of them. The sound is drilling, atonal, with harmonics that make Dean's skull feel as if it is rattling to pieces.

"Jesus, what is that?"

" ** _Stay behind me,_** " says Cas. He clenches fists like boulders and heat pours off him like a furnace. His wings manifest fully, larger than Dean has ever seen them. Ash and sparks rain from them as Cas snaps them out to full extension. They rattle like slate.

"Cas, what -"

" ** _Behind me, Dean!_** " Cas knocks him backward with a twitch of a wing and Dean goes sprawling on the dusty ground.

The thing howls again, louder this time, closer. It trails away into demented, hyena laughter.

Cas is still, waiting.

The ground trembles and then it’s there, leaping out of the fog. It's bird-like. Flat yellow eyes. Snaky neck. That's all Dean can grasp of it. His eyes won't stay focused on it, his mind won't take it in. When he tries, everything goes white and a minute later he's pushing himself up off the ground, blood dripping from his nose, his head one solid throb of pain.

Cas's foot slams into the ground right next to him, wide spatulate toes spreading and digging in. The thing screams horribly and Cas answers, Enochian thundering out like mountains falling. Dean cowers, there's no other word for it, cowers down and covers his head. Wind buffets him, a hot spray of something hits the side of his face. A body hits the ground with crunching impact. Then there is nothing left but the bellows sound of Cas breathing.

Dean uncoils slowly. Cas is standing over him, legs planted to either side of Dean's body. He's much bigger than he was before the fight, towering eighteen feet or more. He's changed shape again, too, his previously thick body going attenuated, with weird backwards-looking joints and grey velvet skin. Light wells like blood from several wounds. His wings are dark and feathered and ...

"Cas," Dean says, his voice cracking. "You've got three heads."

Cas looks down at him out of a nearly featureless oval. Behind it, a ram and a zebra share space on his long, thick neck. All have his blue eyes. **_Dean,_**  he says. There is nothing human left in his voice. He lifts a hand, spreads the elegant, spider-leg fingers, regards them. When he closes them again, they grip the hilt of an outsized angel blade.

"Is this -" Dean's voice fails him. He tries again. "You look. Is this - you? Like, the real you?"

 ** _More or less,_**  says Cas. **_Adjusted for scale._**

Dean realizes that he's on his knees, gaping upward. He gets to his feet, swaying a little. "Hey look, ma," he says. "Still got eyes." He blinks. He's tearing up a bit for some damn reason.

Cas bends down. A breath of some clean scent comes with him, borne on the folds of the weird angel-toga wrapped around his waist. Cas reaches out with his empty hand and cups it carefully around Dean's shoulders.  ** _Dean,_**  he says solemnly.  ** _May I have a hug?_**

Dean laughs, shakily. Steps forward. Wraps his arms around an angel, as far as they will reach, and hugs.

**His face like lightning**

This form, so near to the one that his Grace naturally shapes, seems stable, which is a blessing. It does not escape him that it manifested at the moment that he’d received Dean’s wordless prayer for protection. He feels oddly naked, the more so when Dean is looking at him. It has been millennia since he has worn this shape anywhere other than Heaven. Dean is a strange mix of shy and eager, now, to touch him, and it is very strange to feel that contact through senses so close to his true ones. He is hungry for it, in a way that almost shames him, hungry until he aches.

Lightbulb is ecstatic with the change, clinging to the folds of Castiel’s garment, slipping between the feathers of his wings. Castiel tries, again, to enfold it within his own Grace and, again, it resists him. It pings at him and bounces away to Dean, who cups it absently in a hand and tucks it into the breast pocket of his jacket. It is getting denser, more complex, the more Dean interacts with it.

They find a jagged hole in the side of a proto-mountain, and wind their way downward. The endless fall, as the phoenix had put it. At least, Castiel devoutly hopes that this is the endless fall. There is only one thing that the maw of the beast could be, down in the bottom of Purgatory, and he fears does not have the strength to face it.

Not again.

**You got love, you ain't lonely**

**_An angel died here. A long time ago._**  Cas stands with his heads tipped upward, contemplating the ceiling. He’s tall enough to reach up and gently touch it, sweeping his fingertips delicately through the phosphorescence that clung to the rock. It brightens where he stirs it, as though he is rousing it partially from slumber, and then fades again, slowly.

Lightbulb warbles sadly to himself, bumping against stalactites and not-quite-touching the scattered, shattered Grace.

“Who?” Dean turns a slow circle, taking in the massive expanse of light. Now that he’s looking, he can see a pattern to it. There’s the outline of wings, and that was likely a leg … “And how?”

 ** _The war when Lucifer fell was all encompassing_** , says Cas. ** _It touched all the realms. But it has been too long. I - can no longer tell who this might have been_**. There is sorrow in his voice, deep as oceans.

“I bet Lightbulb knew him,” says Dean, watching the little guy shiver between two strands.

 ** _I think Lightbulb_** **was _him_** , says Cas. He reaches out an arm and Lightbulb flees into the wide grey cushion of his palm.

“You mean - he’s all that’s left of this guy?” Dean looks from the small brightness in Cas’ hand to the dim shimmer on the ceiling. “How is that possible?”

 ** _I don’t know. But there is the same resonance in both these remnants and in Lightbulb._** Cas closes his fingers gently, protectively, around Lightbulb.  ** _No wonder you weep, little brother._**

“Could we put him back together, somehow?” Dean stretches out a hand to where a luminous thread hangs, just barely out of reach. A fine hum sets up house in the nerve ends in his fingertips.

 ** _No._** Cas steps over to Dean, incongruously agile despite his size, and pushes Dean’s hand down with one finger.

“But if it was his -“

**_On earth, you see the charred remnants of wings. Here, you see this. But they are the same. There is nothing here that is divine, anymore._ **

Lightbulb keens and the sound makes Dean’s throat close up painfully.

“Can’t we do anything for him?” he asks.

 ** _Sometimes there is nothing to be done,_** says Cas.

“Bullshit,” says Dean.

 ** _What would you have me do? I could smite him, I suppose,_** says Cas. The ram head tosses, shaking its horns.

“Don’t be an asshole,” Dean says and then yanks on the fabric of Cas’s toga/skirt thing. “Give him here.”

Cas tips his hand sideways and Lightbulb tumbles down into Dean’s cupped hands.

“Hey,” he says, bringing his hands up to his face. He breathes out, gently, watches the resultant flare and shimmer of Lightbulb’s … essence? Body? It’s basically semi-sentient light that he’s holding here. “Hey, shhh. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Lightbulb pings out something that sounds vaguely interrogative.

“We’re here. Not going anywhere, right Cas?”

 ** _Dean,_**  says Cas, kneeling in a rustle of silk and feathers.  ** _We_  are _going somewhere. We’re leaving Purgatory._**

“Then he comes with,” says Dean. He cups his hands tighter, ignoring the sunburny feel that always came when Lightbulb got too upclose and personal with his skin.

Cas looks down at him, the strangely mobile substance of his ivory face registering concern and then fond resignation. His wings drop low, cupping Dean as carefully and tightly as Dean holds Lightbulb.  ** _As you say._**

**Our earthly house**

“Shit,” says Dean, looking at the black expanse. “We’re going to have to swim. Aren’t we.”

**_I will keep you safe._ **

“Yeah, buddy, I know.” Dean pats Castiel absently on the leg. Soul and Grace merge and part effortlessly with each touch now. “Still don’t like it. Anything could be down there.” He crouches, dips a finger, snatches it back out. “Goddamn, that’s cold. I can actually feel it, it’s so cold.”

Castiel casts out, and feels … something. **_There is a presence_** , he says. **_Whoever rules this place is still here_**.

“Great,” Dean mutters. “Well. How do we do this?”

Castiel wades into the water, testing, and then turns back toward shore. **_Hands above the waist_** , he promises.

Dean rolls his eyes. “That’ll be a struggle. Look at the size of those mitts.” He steps forward, his trust as sweet as wine, and Castiel draws him in.

**But all that lives is born to die**

Even held in the warm, weird non-feathers of Cas' wings, Dean can feel the chill of the water. Lightbulb is tucked beneath his chin, casting light into the tight cocoon that is all that Dean can see. Wings on three sides, the velvet grey of Cas' skin on the other. It stirs and flexes above him as Cas pushes through the caves, searching for the portal that he says he can feel down here. Pectoral muscles stretch, contract and stretch again. Cas has no nipples, which, Dean supposes, is not really a surprise. Hard to imagine where angels fit in the mammalian spectrum.

Dean feels small, cradled, safe. It really seems like he should resent that, but he can't summon the will to try. Just as when Cas had stepped into the lightless, freezing water and held out his broomstick arms and cupped, whispering wings, Dean hadn't bothered to argue. He'd only stepped forward into the proffered embrace, closing his eyes. Cas had folded about him with a sigh and slipped beneath the surface.

 ** _Dean,_**  says Cas,  ** _Are you well?_**

"Peachy," Dean mutters.

 ** _I think we are drawing close._**  Cas sounds wary.

"Problems?"

**_I can't be sure. The whole of this place reeks of -_ **

There is an abrupt jolt and Cas reverses, throwing Dean sideways and then against the oven-warmth of Cas's skin. The wings rearrange around Dean. He is pressed firmly against Cas, his cocoon made smaller as one wing unfolds, scythes away through the water. Something roars in pain and fury. Cas's ribs expand against Dean's torso and legs. Another jolt, Cas contracting in on himself, shielding Dean with his whole body. Dean struggles briefly, trying to reach his knife.

 ** _Take a deep breath, Dean_** , says Cas.

Dean, assisted by adrenaline, takes four short, hyperventilating ones and then a deep, lung-filling, belly breath, nods shortly against Cas's chest. The other wing falls away and the water rushes in, seizes him, shocks him almost senseless with cold. Cas's arms catch him up, a hand cradles the back of his head, and then Cas beats his wings through the water and they shoot forward.

The thing, whatever it is, roars again. Lightbulb throbs against Dean's collarbone, bleeding light and heat against him.  _We're running,_  he thinks, astonished.  _What could make Cas run?_

He cannot see. The water is too achingly cold for him to even try to open his eyes, not to mention the bruising pressure of it as Cas forces them along at speed. If it weren't for Cas's inhuman grip he would have been ripped free immediately. He presses his mouth and nose against Cas, focusing on not breathing, not breathing.

Cas cries out, their mad headlong flight is arrested with a bonerattling jerk, and Dean feels Cas's fingers loosen. Panic floods him even as water floods between the two of them. Light bursts into being, red through Dean's closed eyelids. Familiar light. Grace. Then Cas is gone, and Dean is adrift and sinking.

"Cas!" he screams, stupidly. Water in his mouth, in his ears, freezing him alive. His eyes are open, he knows, but all he sees is a blur of white somewhere above and darkness everywhere else.

Cas shrieks, his Voice like a drill, and the whiteness explodes into brilliance.

There is Cas, alight and shining like a star, angel blade out. One of his - oh, jesus, one of his heads is gone, just gone, and he is bleeding light like blood out into the water. Around him is a tattered shroud of oily not-light. Dean can't call it dark, or even black. It is an absence, a negation. Where it blocks his vision of the angel it swallows all the light and leaves him with the queasy feeling that he is looking at a rip in the world, beyond which is nothingness, a vast emptiness more complete than the space between the stars.

Dean kicks, struggles in the water, pushes upward. His boots feel like cement, his coat is a leaden weight.  _Please_ , he prays, to whom he doesn't know. His only salvation, the only mercy and grace he has ever known is dying right in front of him, but he prays anyway.  _Please._  His vision is dimming, his chest throbs with the need for air.

A single note, barely heard over the combat. Dean turns his head, desperate. Lightbulb shoots toward him like a falling star and impacts dead center in Dean's breastbone.

Clarity and strength shoot through Dean. He kicks once, powerfully, up and forward, through a closing gap in the thing's substance and fetches up against Cas's side.

 ** _Dean,_**  Cas cries, pained and fearful.

Back in the world, it would have been so much harder, given mortal flesh and the limits of earthly physics. Here, in the shifting morass that is Purgatory, it only requires a certain point of view. Dean takes hold of Cas's hand, the spread of those elongated fingers wide enough to span his chest, pushes it in and _believes._

When Grace and soul contact one another, everything just - goes.

**My brother’s keeper**

Castiel dreams.

_Battle, the ending of worlds. Angels, tall and glorious, burning like stars in their true forms. Demons swarming like locusts from the earth. Smoke and Grace and the unearthly screams of the fallen. Lucifer and Micheal flinging themselves at one another, hate and love twisting them together until their wrath breaks the very fabric of nature._

_One of the Fallen flees through a crack, trailing terror and rage, and Ramiel follows._

_Through the seething unstuff of the fourth realm zhir sibling flees, past pockets where the souls of Nephilim cower away from them, past the hazy beginnings of forests and fields. Further in and further down, until zhe brings zhir quarry to bay in the depths of a cave, half-made in the hollows of the almost-earth. The promise of water breaks their light against the walls in dapples as they strive. Remiel wounds zhir, and is wounded in return._

**_As I love you, surrender_ ** _, one of them says to the other._

**_No_ ** _, says the other, sorrowing._

_They fall upon each other again, unable to do otherwise._

_Agony. Grief. The sudden heartbreak swell of triumph. One last raising of a Voice to a Heaven that cannot hear it._

_And then._

_Nothing._

**Singing to an ocean, I can hear the ocean's roar**

"Wake."

Dean opens his eyes.

He's floating, half-tangled with Cas's limp body. There is light, pale and chill, and he is still cold, freezing, in fact, his limbs aching with it. But he can see and he - he isn't breathing. His lungs make an abortive attempt to expand and simply can't. He panics, thrashes, knocks Cas slightly away from him. A wing slides aside and he can see into the small cavern they are in.

A woman, her blonde hair and white garments drifting around her, observes him dispassionately. "Stop that," she says. "You don't need to breathe."

Dean stops. It still feels weird as hell but she's right. If he just concentrates on not trying to breathe, the need to dissipates. It also means he can't talk. When he opens his mouth to try, water rushes in, numbing his tongue.  _Cas,_  he mouths at her. Cas's limbs float gently against his.

"He lives." She seems to be talking normally. Her mouth moves, the sound arrives in Dean's ears, distorted a bit by the water. No bubbles rise, though, and she draws no breath.

Dean turns to Cas again, tugs on his shoulder until Dean can see the weeping, ragged hole where the zebra once was. It makes him want to vomit, or scream. His hand hovers over it, where sluggish stream of liquid light trail through the water.

"His wounds are grievous, but he will survive." She's closer now, and he can see her face. It's square and pale to the point of green. Her nose and mouth are wide. Her eyes are tilted, a strange no-colour that is not quite grey. She has no pupils.

 _Who?_  He points at her, trying to come between her and Cas without seeming as if he were doing so.

She purses her lips. "Poseidon? Yam? Llŷr?" She narrows her eyes at him. "But you are a hunter. To you, I suppose I would be the siren Alpha."

He recoils, collides with Cas's unresponsive form.

She laughs. "No fear, mortal man. I quenched those thirsts millennia ago." She reaches out, touches a fingertip to the hollow at the base of his throat. "I'm not going to seduce you. We should talk, however."

The water is suddenly gone. He drops ten feet to the rock floor of the cavern and manages to roll into it, fetch up against a stalagmite. Cas folds slowly down beside him, collapsing in on himself with a whispery rustle. They are both dry as a bone. Dean draws in a great whoop of air and then coughs.

The Alpha sits down on the rock a few feet away, composing her robes about her.

"Where are we?" Dean says, when he finishes hacking his lungs out. "The - the thing that attacked Cas -"

"The leviathan fled when you breached your soul." She eyes him with a mix of respect and amusement.

"Leviathan," he repeats. He's not really surprised.

"A startling tactic, and effective, down here. If not without consequence."

His mouth twists a bit, sour. "Got your attention, did it?"

"Oh, Dean," she says, shaking her head. "You had my attention the minute you and your companion entered my waters."

"This is your -" he searches for the world Cas had used "- demesne."

"My territory, yes." She brings her knees up and wraps her arms around them.

"What's your game?" he asks. "What do you want?"

"Nothing. No, really," she says, reading his face. "I don't want anything. I bear you no ill will, you or Castiel. My time in servitude to him was brief and entertaining, in its way. Angels," she says with scornful fondness. "They're so stupid. I suppose they can't help it, but still."

"Hey," he says. For all the times he's called Cas a child, berated him for dumb decisions and assumptions, it's just wrong to hear it from someone else. "He isn't stupid. He made some wrong choices."

"Please don't," she says, holding up a hand. "I'm not interested."

"Why the hell are we here, then?" Dean says, irritated.

"Because it was easier to save you than to deal with him if he woke up and found you dead." She looks down, sighs, and rearranges her skirts. "Love is such an elemental force, isn’t it?" She smiles a bit, ruefully.

"Yeah, well," says Dean, and doesn't have anything to follow it. He realizes he's smoothing his thumb over the arch of Cas's eyesocket.

Cas stirs under his fingers.

"Hey," says Dean, bending down. "Cas?"

Cas opens his eyes.

Dean lets out a breath, smiles helplessly. Tears well up, unbidden. "Hey, you, uh -"

He's cut off as Cas lunges off the ground, sweeping Dean beneath and behind him with one hand. His wings mantle protectively over Dean. The angel blade makes a reappearance, dropping into Cas's hand from whatever pocket dimension he keeps it in.  ** _Stay down, Dean!_**  Cas's blood, or Grace, or whatever it is, patters down the rock around Dean. Drops of it spatter onto his hands, his neck. It smells of myrrh and ozone.

"Cas!" he says. "Cas, stop, you're bleeding, goddammit!"

 ** _Queen of the Waters,_**  says Cas.  ** _By what right do you hinder us?_**

The Alpha rises to her feet. "Rude," she chides him mildly. "Your human charge was more mannerly."

"Stop," says Dean, desperately. His hands are sticky with angel blood, now. It is flowing in streams down Cas's shoulder and chest. "Cas, stop. She’s not hindering us, just wait."

Cas wavers and then lowers his blade.  ** _We should go._**

"Cas, you're - she's the first thing that hasn't actively tried to kill us! You need to, to rest, at least. She might even help!"

 ** _She won't_** , says Cas.

"I won't," she agrees.

Dean tries to duck out from under Cas and it stopped by the press of Cas's enormous hand against his chest. "What happened to 'no ill will'?" he demands.

"I think you are mistaking an absence of malice for some form of caring," she says. "I'm a monster, Dean. Every soul here is a monster. Did you forget?"

 ** _We should go_** , Cas repeats.

“You won’t get out,” she tells them, as Cas begins to back away, pulling Dean with him.

“Oh, and you know everything?” Dean regrets it immediately when she turns her pale eyes on him.

“More than you, mortal child,” she says. “You will die here and your soul will be lost. And he will not be able to save you.”

“We’ve faced down worse,” says Dean. Cas grips him a little firmer and he puts his hand over one of the massive fingers.

“Your pain will bring me no satisfaction,” she says to Cas. “Please remember that, when grief overwhelms you, and stay your hand from my realm.”

Cas makes some kind of noise, furious and defiant.

“Good bye,” she calls as Cas pulls Dean into a side passage, wraps him into his sticky, Grace-laden wings, and plunges back into the water.

**All who are weary and heavy-laden**

Castiel swims slowly, heavily, fighting to keep his equilibrium. He has never been wounded so grievously. He has seen other angels take such wounds and die and yet here he is, not dead, not dying.

He knows why.

He can feel it, Dean’s soulstuff, throbbing and burning in his Grace, a miniature sun of love and power. He can see the space where it came from, a crater in Dean’s core, all of his chest darkened to Castiel’s celestial sight. Dean is hunched up against Castiel, hands restlessly moving across Castiel’s torso, wiping futilely at the silver stains and that, too, was an effect of Dean’s will. The wounded bleed, in Dean’s opinion, so Castiel bleeds. It’s no more or less a drain than if the Grace simply dissipated into the air, just messier. More distressing, if Dean’s muttering is any indication.

“Stupid,” he says, and, “why would you,” and, “gonna kill that no-body sonofabitch.” He is weeping, a little. Castiel doesn’t think he’s noticed.

Castiel is slowing. He lifts his heads from the water and vocalizes as quietly as possible. Returning echoes show him a shore, not too far, and he makes for it, knowing his strength will not last much longer. He needs to rest. They both need to rest.

**Now listen, when you say your body's aching**

Another cave, this one dark and hollow, floored with red-black sand as soft as feathers. Dean sits crosslegged, one of Cas’s heavy, massive heads in his lap. Cool, smooth, eggshell-white flesh presses hard into his shins, shivers beneath his hands. The ram’s head lays against the sand. The stump, less raw now, still horrible to look at, seeps silver not-quite-wet down his right thigh. There is a pool of it beneath his knee, which provides the only light. The drops, when they impact, make a high, tiny ping! that reminds Dean of Lightbulb.

He rubs his chest, feeling the soreness there, the phantom warmth. He thinks he knows where the little guy is now, and it is both comforting and queasy-making.

 ** _Dean,_**  says Cas, eyes still shut.

“Still here,” Dean says, putting his hand back to Cas’s forehead.

**_Yes. I know._ **

“Your uh, your neck looks a bit better.”

**_I am healing._ **

“Will it - grow back?”

 ** _No._** Cas stirs, his wings rustling across the sand. Dean can’t read the movement in the dark.

Dean bows his head over Cas. “She said you would heal.”

 ** _I will._** Two fingers reach up, brush feather-soft down the side of Dean’s face.  ** _Don’t weep._**

“Fuck that, man, I thought you were dying. I thought …” He takes in a shaky breath. “I think Lightbulb is dead. Or gone, or - whatever.”

 ** _He isn’t gone. Just changed._**  Cas opens his eyes.  ** _He wasn’t sentient, Dean. He wasn’t a he._**

“Bullshit,” says Dean. “He talked to us, he - he sacrificed for us.”

**_Because that was how you saw him. I told you before, Dean, you shape this place, your will is strong here._ **

Dean hunches his shoulders forward. “You’re saying - I made him do it. I made him die for us.”

 ** _You infected a stray spark of Grace with courage and free will. And then he chose._**  Cas’s eyes squinch a little at the corners.  ** _I think it’s becoming a habit with you._**

“Don’t joke,” Dean says, shaking his head.

 ** _What would he have been without you, Dean? Forever wandering, forever lost, nothing more than a scrap of sadness. Honour his choice._**  Cas drops his fingertips to Dean’s chest.

“So he’s really in there, is he?” Dean shifts.

 ** _Yes._** Cas blinks at his expression. ** _It’s hardly the first time, Dean._**

“Wait, what?”

 ** _Every time I have healed you, transported you, I have left a small portion of my Grace behind. It’s an unavoidable side effect._** Cas tilts his head. Upside down, nearly featureless and reclining, yet it’s the same  _I don’t understand your odd human reactions_  look he’d given Dean so many times before.

“Every - you mean - Uriel? Zachariah? I got their bits floating around too?” Dean grimaces. “Gross, man. You didn’t think to tell me that before?”

**_It’s temporary. The Grace integrates with your soul. Lightbulb will do so, as well._ **

“Great,” Dean mutters. “He dies and then I eat him.”

 ** _That is an inaccurate metaphor._**  Cas attempts to sit up and pauses, his whole body stiff and shaking.

“Whoa, whoa,” says Dean, pressing ineffectually on a broad, velvet skinned shoulder. “Where are you going?”

**_The portal is near, I think. There is no other reason for leviathan to have been close._ **

“What, are they gatekeepers? Lay down, Cas, dammit.” He shoves as hard as he can and Cas gives way, relaxing back into Dean’s lap in small, pained increments.

 ** _The next domain is theirs,_**  Cas says. ** _It should be mostly empty._**

“Right.” Dean keeps his voice level. “Because most of them are topside.”

 ** _A few did get swept back down when I expelled the souls,_** says Cas.  ** _And, of course …_**

“Dick,” Dean says. “Well, fuck.” He clenches his jaw for a moment. They can’t catch a break, it seems, no matter what pocket of existence they were in. “All the more reason for you to rest up,” he says, “if we have to take that asshole on again.”

 ** _Perhaps._**  Cas sounds exhausted. He turns, slowly and painfully, with Dean’s fumbling help, until he is curled around Dean like a giant cat, his cheek pillowed on Dean’s thighs, the ram’s head drooping against the curve of a wing. The other wing Cas sweeps around them both like an ozone-scented tent. Dean leans sideways against the solid warmth of Cas’s chest.

In the near-total darkness, cradled and cradling, Dean feels as close to sleep as he’s gotten in Purgatory. Cas’s breath slows, the wing over Dean’s head softens and relaxes a bit. Feathers tickle the back of his neck.

“I thought you were dying,” says Dean.

**_You saved me._ **

“Anytime,” says Dean, and closes his eyes.

**My flesh and my heart may fail**

Castiel waits, in the dark, knowing that he will not get stronger. Nothing grows or changes, here. Dean’s soul will not replenish itself while they are trapped in Purgatory, his Grace will not mend. All they can do is go on swapping pieces of themselves back and forth, while this place slowly erodes them. He waits, because holding Dean is sweet, and once they pass the final door – he can feel it, further in – there may not be another chance.

This is not the fall. He knows that, too. What waits for them down there is the maw. He is probably going to die. Dean, too, though he still hopes that he can buy Dean’s freedom with his life. He has no plan. He can only hope that when Dick finds them, and he will find them, something will present itself. He doesn’t believe in luck, exactly, but after all they have been through he does believe in Winchester ingenuity. He believes in Dean.

There is a still place at the heart of him, a small quiet place that used to hold his faith in God. It holds Dean, now, and he knows that is blasphemy and he doesn’t care. He has not been an angel of the Lord for a long time now.

Dean sighs, his breath curling around Castiel’s neck. “Should we -?”

**_Not yet._ **

Selfish. Foolish. But it is sweet, to hold Dean here in the dark.

**If it keeps on rainin' levee's goin' to break**

Cas doesn't let Dean even look at the leviathan portal. Dean has the vague impression of a swirling vortex of water and stone, a deafening howl that is cut to bearable levels by the clasp of Cas's wings. Cas cries out as they go through, a shriek of pain that freezes Dean's breath in his lungs, so close to the sound he'd made when the leviathan had mutilated him.

The portal spits them out into cold grey light, and Cas snaps his wings out, clutching Dean with trembling arms, slowing their fall in time to make a tumbled, awkward landing into damp sand. Dean rolls out of Cas's embrace and fetches up against a rough stone, scraping the shit out of his knees and elbows.

"Ah, fuck," he wheezes, shoving himself upright. "Cas, you okay?"

Cas is wavering on hands and knees, heads hung low. His wings drape leadenly over the brown, rocky hillocks.  ** _I will be fine_** , he says. The sand around him hisses and pops as his skin contacts it.

"Meaning, right now you aren't fine," says Dean, putting a hand to Cas's mile-wide shoulders. It's weird to feel so protective of a being five times his size, but there it is. It's Cas, no matter what shape he's in.

Cas lifts his most-human head and fixes Dean with those bizarre blues. ** _It is not of import._**

"You are so full of bullshit." Dean's hand trails down Cas's chest as Cas stands, coming to rest somewhere around the knee area. Christ he's a big bastard in this form. _Finally someone to tower over Sammy_ , Dean thinks, and suffers a pang of homesickness so strong he nearly tears up.

"So," he says, throwing his shoulders back. "We gonna have to mix it up with leviathan again? Gotta say," he looks around, "I don't think much of the welcome wagon."

The place is barren as fuck though more stable looking than anything since the first level of Purgatory. Craggy rock formations thrust out of brown sand toward a grim purple sky. There is the smell of iron and damp and that particular oily-garbage stink that leviathan blood gives off. No foliage, no creatures, no damn movement, so far as he can see.

 ** _They are here,_**  says Cas.  ** _Though they are few._**

"I guess I'd want to break out, too, if this is what the cage looked like," Dean mutters.

 ** _This was a sea,_** says Cas. ** _What you see is the empty bed where it lay._**

"Where's the water?"

**_There was no water. The sea was leviathan. They teamed in their countless, formless numbers, and ate everything that was not them. Until I came, and opened the door._ **

Dean blinks across the ragged landscape, imagining inky blackness. "Jesus," he mutters.

 ** _Dean._** Cas hefts the blade, scans the horizon.  ** _We should get moving._**

"Yeah, ok. Got any idea which way?"

**_I do. You won't like it._ **

"Oh. Good."

Cas begins to walk and Dean breaks into a trot to keep up. "You gonna tell me where we're going?"

**_You remember what the phoenix told us? Three ways to exit, each with their own peril._ **

"Yeah, the ring of fire, the endless fall, the mouth of - wait. No. This was the endless fall, wasn't it? You says this way was the endless fall."

**_I may have been mistaken._ **

"This is the maw? There’s a maw here?” Dean looks around at the desolation. And then, horribly, it dawns on him. “If you think I'm going to saunter happily down Dick's gullet, you have another think coming, angelbrain." He grabs Cas's toga and hauls on it. "Wait up a second. Wait. Wait!"

Cas comes to a halt and looks down at him.

"That other levi almost killed you," says Dean. "And you want to take on the big daddy? There’s kind of a shortage of holy bones down here, you may have noticed, and I don't know if I can do the soul juice thing again, not for a while anyway. It - it kinda knocked me on my ass."

 ** _Your sacrifice saved our lives_** , says Cas,  ** _but it didn't kill that leviathan. It only drove it away. That tactic wouldn't work here, in any case._**

"So you're saying that we have approximately zero weapons that will do any damn good."

**_Fighting was never going to get us out of here, Dean._ **

"Well, I hope you have some brilliant plan, because fighting is all I do, Cas! It's all I - it's all I got for you." Dean spreads his arms.

 ** _That is_** **not true.** The sand doesn't just squeal and fuse at the pressure of Cas's angelic wrath, it wails. Blue fire runs in sheets over the hummocks. His wings flare open, feathers rattling like scimitars. **_You are so much more than you …_**

Cas trails off, staggers, and falls to one knee, Grace welling slowly from the stump of his missing head.

"Shit!" Dean rushes forward, catches the weight of Cas's descending hand on his shoulder. He grunts, braces, bears up beneath it, and reaches for Cas's cheek. "Hey," he says, "hey, take it easy. Easy." The smooth velvet skin feels cool to the touch.

Cas closes his eyes and turns his face into Dean’s palm. Dean takes a shuddering breath at the intimacy of it. **_Dean._**

“Maybe we just, just hole up for a while. You’re not a hundred percent, buddy.” He draws Cas in, strokes his thumbs over Cas’s cheekbones. “You need rest.”

Cas’s eyes open again, burning and blue and very close. **_Dean, I need to tell you …_**

"Well, now."

Dean's turned, his knife out, before he's fully registered the words. Cas's wings sweep out on either side of him, but it's a weak gesture, and he can hear the crystalline ping! of Cas's bleeding Grace contacting the sand.

Dick Roman stands among the barren rocks of the bottom of Purgatory as if he were in a boardroom, his suit immaculate, his teeth as shark-white as ever. The nun's legbone is still jammed through his neck, though he hardly seems to notice it.

"Dean Winchester. Castiel," says Dick, "I knew we'd get face time again."

His grin is as wide as a chasm.

**A beast rising out of the sea**

When the leviathan had possessed his vessel, they’d shoved Castiel aside, down, buried him beneath their endless oozing weight. They’d believed, and so had he, that they had snuffed him out. He had not known, until then, that there was a power in the universe other than God or an archangel, that could so overmatch him.

They had been careless, and arrogant, and he had survived.

He didn’t think Dick was going to make the same mistake twice.

**Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good**

"Son of a bitch," Dean says. He tries to step forward and Cas's hand tightens on his shoulder, whether for support or in defense he can't tell.

"Not much of a scuttlebutt down here," says Dick, with a little ironic tilt of his head. "No water coolers, as you can see! But that doesn't mean I don't have my ear to the ground. Literally," he adds, that grin of his stretching wider. "I heard you, Castiel," Dick says. "Heard you in the bones of Purgatory. You cut quite a swathe, you and your human."

 ** _What do you want?_**   Cas asks.

"To make a deal, of course," says Dick.

"Fuck you," Dean says.

"Not a promising start to negotiations," says Dick. "Let me make a counter offer."

His transition from smarmy motherfucker into twelve foot tall oil slick horror show is abrupt, and Dean has only begun tensing his muscles to dodge when Dick is  _there_  in front of them, one sledgehammer fist descending. The concussion throws Dean into the air and he lands in a sprawl some twenty feet away, blood in his mouth, a shooting pain in his ribs he's intimately familiar with. Dean rolls to his feet, hoping he doesn't end up with bone splinters in a lung, and jerks out his knife.

Dick has Cas by both wrists, forcing him to his knees. The angel blade lies abandoned to one side, the tip stained black. Cas is straining, Grace flowing down his side in rivulets from his stump, wings beating the air. It's of no use. Dick pushes him backward, bending his spine in a painful arc. "Castiel," he hisses out of a toothy, black-hole mouth. "My good and faithful doorman. You're a bit tall for the job at the moment."

Cas screams.

Dean flings himself forward without thinking and manages three slices - hamstrings, kidneys, back of the neck, each closing like water behind the blade - before Dick lets go of one of Cas's wrists and casually backhands Dean. Dean hits a rock this time and the world goes red and black.  _Get up. If you can stand, you can fight. If you can fight, you can win. Get up or die._  Somewhere far away, Cas screams again.  _Get up or_ Cas _dies._

Dean gets his arms under him. There's blood in his eyes, stinging, and he blinks desperately. Dick looms over Cas, grown even more massive - wait, no, Cas is  _shrinking_  somehow, changing, his limbs grown shorter and pinker, the ram's head vanishing. And he goes on screaming, his Voice fading into human tones, ever more tortured.

"Stop," Dean slurs. "Stop it!" He stumbles forward. "Cas!"

Dick casts Cas, human shaped, away like a toy he is bored with and is suddenly back in the suit and the corporate haircut, adjusting the cuffs of his shirt. "Never could keep a leash on your dog, could you, angel?" He grabs Dean by the throat, lifts him off the ground. "Now. Let's start with some motivation."

He breaks Dean's left wrist with an easy twist and Dean can't help the gasp that escapes his constricted airway.

Cas struggles to one knee. "Stop," he says. His voice is like ten miles of bad road. One eye is swollen shut and blood runs down that side of his face in a sheet. "What do you  _want_?"

"I'm going to let you go," Dick says. "I'm going to let you walk right out of here, just like you want. Sorry about the downsizing. Gotta have that nice fleshy envelope if you want to fit through the slot." He champs his teeth a couple of times.

"Dean -"

"Oh, no no, Castiel," Dick says cheerily. He shakes Dean a little. "He's my collateral. See, when you get back topside, you're going to open that door again. That nice, big door, the one without all that pesky small print about who can use it. And when I come on through, I'll bring you your cute little human pet." He spread his free hand. "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours."

"I'll scratch your fucking back, you piece of shit," Dean spits, clutching at Dick's wrist with his one working hand.

"I am not leaving Dean with you," says Cas. He staggers upright.

"Have to tell you, you are not negotiating from a place of strength," says Dick, all faux sympathy. His hand tightens on Dean's neck. "But I'm not unreasonable. I could send you off with a keepsake. How about his tongue?"

"He won't survive here," Cas says. "He'll die without me. Send him instead and I will stay."

"C's! Nn," Dean manages.

"Oh, don't worry about that," Dick says genially. "I can keep him kicking. Indefinitely."

 _I'll show you kicking, you son of bitch,_  Dean thinks, as his vision fills with exploding black flowers. He expends the last of his oxygen in a jackknifing heave and attempts to boot Dick in the side of the face. He doesn't quite make it - the sole of his right boot just barely brushes Dick's cheekbone. On the way down, though, it bounces off the end of the holy femur lodged in Dick's esophagus.

Dick screeches like a million fingernails on the universe's largest chalkboard and throws Dean away,  _again._  This time, however, Dean collides not with the ground but with Cas, who catches him in weak, trembling, human arms and goes tumbling down with Dean's weight landing solidly in his stomach. He wheezes in Dean's ear but holds on tight. They sprawl there in the dust for a moment, gasping, while Dick goes on making that godawful noise, flailing like an injured spider.

"Get up," Cas says, shoving at Dean.

One hand lands right on Dean's busted rib. "Fuck!" He rolls off Cas, wavers upright as Cas does the same. His head feels about to explode. The dead dry bottom of the leviathan's empty sea swims in his vision.

"The bone," says Cas. His eyes stutter white light for a moment and then fade to human blue.

"Yeah, great. Good," says Dean. "How do we get to it? I'm half dead and you're - Cas, what did he do to you?"

"Distract him." says Cas, and then falls to one knee.

"Cas!"

Twenty feet away, Dick stops his anguished stagger-dance and straightens. His face is hardly there anymore, his eyes tiny pinpricks, his mouth a nightmare gash that bisects his head. Black ooze seeps where the bone enters and exits his neck. "That hurrrrrrrrrrrrt," he says. His voice buzzes and clicks. "You filthy little prrrrrrrrrrotozoa."

"Good," Dean says, stepping sideways away from Cas. Distract Dick. Great. He can hardly keep his feet, has to keep blinking to focus. His knife is just plain gone, not that it was much use to begin with. Still, he’s got his mouth and that was the one thing he never had any trouble running, regardless of the condition the rest of him was in. "As much as when I stuck it in you the first time?"

"I'm going to eat yourrrrr tongue, little animal," Dick says. His shoulders get lumpy and dark, his arms stretch. Horrifying as the shutter-blink of his previous transformation was, it doesn’t hold a candle to this slow bloating, his skin going dark and sticky, legs and belly sliding gloppily out of the fabric of his suit. The bone is barely visible, an ivory toothpick jutting out below the murky grey rows of teeth.

"Come and get it," Dean says, as his ribs scream and his head screams and his broken wrist sobs. He's empty handed. The last fading remnant of Lightbulb heats his chest, uselessly. "Come and get it, Exxon." He half-trips over a rock in his sidle away from where Cas is now leaning on one hand against the dirt. They're going to die here.

Dick advances on him, slow and deliberate. "I'll keep you inside me, I think," he says. It's barely intelligible, his mouth is so deformed. "Inside, in the dark." His jaws gape, impossibly wide. He could swallow Dean whole. He could swallow the world.

Dean gives him the finger.

Light blossoms, blue-white and actinic, accompanied by the sonic boom of angelic wings and Cas's angular, eggshell pale fingers wrap around the lump that is Dick's head. They flex, straining, and Dick is yanked backwards, the impossible gel-flesh of his body bending, the thresher maw of his mouth pointing toward the sky. Cas's mask face appears over his shoulder, expressionless but for the narrowing of his glowing eyes, but Dean can practically see the bared teeth he'd be sporting on a human face, that weird grimace Cas always made when he fought.

 _This dumb move again?_ Dean thinks, elated, and then takes three running steps and launches himself. He hits the tar-baby surface of Dick's chest with a wet squelch. The stink of eons envelops him, his body sinks into fetid heat, but he flails his right hand up, digging his knees into yielding, rubbery awfulness for leverage. He closes his hand around the end of Sister Mary Constant's femur. Yanks.

Black ooze fountains out as the bone comes free in Dean's grip and Dick bellows and heaves like an earthquake. He rips his head free from Cas's grip and then his mouth is coming down at Dean, a tunnel of teeth like a mirror maze in a fun house, just teeth, ravening sharp teeth repeating into infinity. Dean hooks the bone forward, drives the point in just behind the first row, and lets his weight drop.

There is a brief moment of resistance and then Dick opens like a zipper, the bone dragging through his non-flesh as Dean slides downward. It makes a noise like - like nothing Dean's vocabulary or life experience equips him to describe. It makes the noise of a leviathan being torn asunder. There is blackness. There is nothing but blackness, exploding outward, wet, hot darkness enveloping every part of Dean's body and every sense he possesses rebels against what they are being forced to endure. Dean isn't sure whether he is killing Dick or being eaten by him, he just knows he wants it to end.

Eventually, it does.

**Passion as fierce as the grave**

Castiel watches Dean pinwheel into the ground and lay there, horrifyingly limp. Dick goes on collapsing, the violence of his unmaking boring a hole between planes.

Castiel feels the material of his physical self trembling, on the edge of failure. Without a form, without a body of some kind, he will unspool. He will end as a scattering of light across this dead sea bed, he will come apart and leave not even a lost mindless scrap of who he was.

Or.

He drags himself to Dean’s side, hovers over him. The damage is catastrophic. Dean is dying. He cups Dean’s skull in his hands and expends too much of himself to heal the intercranial bleeding, the massive trauma to Dean’s parietal lobe. He needs Dean to know, to understand. He needs Dean to forgive him.

He needs Dean to wake the fuck up.

**If my wings should fail me, Lord**

**_Dean._ **

_No._  Pain is waiting for him, he can tell. Pain and awfulness and can't he just sleep a little longer?

 ** _Dean._**  More insistent.

"Dammit, Cas," he mutters, or tries. There's something wrong with his mouth. The pain, sensing his imminent consciousness, creeps up on leaden, horrible feet. He hurts. Wrist, ribs, neck, jaw, back, head.

 ** _Dean._**  Cas sounds terrible.  ** _Please wake up, Dean._**

The pain has arrived. He knows this kind of pain. This isn't 'shot of whiskey, walk it off.' It isn't even bedrest and vicodine. This is serious. Everything above the waist is agony, but it’s the dead lack of sensation from that point down that’s more terrifying.

"Well, fuck." He manages to get the words past swollen lips.

 ** _Dean._**  Cas, near tears, if an angel in trueform is capable of crying. There are hands cupping his head, huge soft hands. Thumbs lightly brush his cheekbones.

Dean forces his eyes open, blinks gummily. Cas's angelface hovers above him, the velvet skin pale as milk beneath the spatter of leviathan gunk. "Hey, Cas," he says and then coughs, layering a fine spray of red over the black on Cas's face. His ribs wake from serious pain to ‘oh fuck make it stop something is really wrong’ pain. Not good. Not good.

 ** _Don't speak,_**  Cas says.  ** _Dean. I'm going to heal you. You must go through the door. It won't - he won't stay open for long._**

Cas turns Dean's head, slowly and gently. To their left, not fifteen feet away, lies a seething mass of black fringed with horribly familiar teeth. In the middle of it, a whirlpool breaks open into light. Clean, ordinary daylight, so beautiful that Dean could weep.

 ** _Do you understand?_**  Cas turns Dean's face back, searches his eyes with desperate intent.  ** _Blink once for yes._**

He understands. Understands there's no fucking way this is going down the way Cas intends it to. "Cas," he says. More blood wets his lips. "Coming with me."

 ** _I can't._**  Cas flexes his long fingers, the smoothness of his face draws together above his eyes in distress.  ** _I no longer fit, Dean. I cannot draw my vessel together anymore, I am at the last of my strength._**

"Heal me 'n we'll tlk," Dean says. It's getting harder to breathe.

 ** _Dean._**  Cas shakes his head.  ** _I wanted you to know, I, I wanted - many things. But this is worthy. You are worthy._**  His eyes are lambent, are welling with light. It drips down onto Dean's face like warm rain.  ** _Please don't blame yourself._**

"No," says Dean. "No no no, Cas, Cas!"

Light is rising from Cas's skin now, blue everywhere like a rising tide. Something pops inside Dean's chest and suddenly he can breathe again. Grace rains down on him and Cas makes a small, pained noise.

"Cas," he howls, tearing at the steel-strong fingers at his cheeks. "No, Cas, stop!"

 ** _Dean._**  Aching with sorrow and longing and -

"Cas," Dean says, his voice cracking. He puts his hands to the face above his, human hands on angel flesh. There is another way. He only has to be brave enough to take it. "Cas." His throat is dry. "I invite you."

The light wavers. Those impossible blue eyes widen.

"Everybody wins," he pleads. "C'mon, I know you can steer me, even with - without working legs," and the fear there is choking, wretched, "just drive me through and get me to a hospital."

**_Dean, I can't ask this of you._ **

"You aren't." He tightens his grip on Cas's face. "I'm offering." Somewhere to the left, the Dick-door makes a gloppy sound. "And we ain't got much time to debate. You wanna die for me? We can discuss that at a later date, you stubborn asshole. For now, would you get in here already?"

Cas shakes his head, shuddering.  ** _You are not of my vessel's line, Dean. This could kill you._**

"Bullshit." Dean grins, desperate. "I was built for Micheal, remember? Lots of room and all the extras."

 ** _If - if you are sure. Dean, I -_**  Cas's grip on his face has turned soft, nearly a caress.

"I'm saying yes," Dean says. His heart is galloping. "Please. Yes."

Cas drops his massive forehead down to Dean's, his eyes closing.  ** _As you wish._**

Cas's fingers lift off his skin like smoke and then

then

a universe

of crashing glory

a song of

overwhelming beauty

a mind as vast as

ages moving

inside his

body and

**_Dean_ ** _Cas howwherecanyouohgod **be at peace**_

love like a tidal wave, love like wings, like sunlight and air, like an irritated, withholding, cryptic Angel of the Lord opening up in fractal after fractal of love love love

Dean comes back to himself on his knees, gasping in air, arms clasped around his pain-free torso. He bring shaking hands out in front of his face, unable to believe that they aren't glowing. He feels as though he should be glowing. "C-Cas?" His chattering teeth cut the word to bits.

 _i am here_  

"Oh, man. Cas. Are you ok?"

_the portal Dean_

He looks over, sees the iris of the whirlpool contract slightly. "Right. Shit. Fuck. Okay." Stand. He needs to stand. "Little help?

His hands drop to the earth, push. His legs flex, straighten. His body rises with economical precision and balances, ready, on the balls of his feet.

"Okay, that's a little weird," he says.

_i am sorry_

The portal goes "gloop" and shrinks again.

"Fuck it," Dean says. "Home, Jeeves!" He laughs, a little hysterically, and then lets out one of his stupid girlish shrieks as Cas turns his body and hurls it at the narrowing aperture. "Oh, fuck, shit, Cas, wait wait wait!"

Cas does not wait. Cas hurls them in a flat dive at the portal, tucking Dean's head and shoulders in, flexing the arches of his feet. They pass through with bare inches to spare on each side and fall into the not-space between the realms.

**Love is as strong as death**

Dean. Dean’s soul. Dean is a universe, a spacious, gracious vault of breathtaking beauty and at the same time a clasp so intimate it overwhelms Castiel. He tries, he does, but Dean’s love, all around him now, a balm and a cradle and a shout, is pushing and tugging at him, soothing the torn and ragged places in his Grace, demanding entry and making room. He can’t hold himself apart, not entirely. Where Jimmy had stepped aside in respect and awe, Dean seizes Castiel and grips him tight as, together, they escape Purgatory.

**So now you'd better stop and rebuild all your ruins**

They fall forever in howling chaos and then for what feels like maybe three feet through air and then they are rolling across the ground. Real ground, with twigs and dirt that feels like dirt, gritty and real beneath Dean's palms. Dead leaves crunch and shatter under his shoulders, his knees. They come to a stop against something that rattles and pings metallically and Dean knows before he opens his eyes that it's a chainlink fence. Plain old chainlink along some roadside because he can smell the exhaust and the asphalt and the dusty dry brown grass on the verge.

_we are back_

_are you alright_

"Yeah," says Dean. He/they flop over onto his back and he opens his eyes and looks up at the vault of the blue, blue sky. "Yeah." He has a confusing moment where he thinks he might cry and tries to push it down, and then realizes that Cas has already seen/known his repressed tears and then gives up, too confused to parse who he's trying to hide from anymore.  Moisture trickles down the sides of his face. "Are -?"

_i am well_

_but i think_

_i am sorry dean_

"You can't get out," says Dean. "Yep. Okay." He thinks about that for a moment. "Okay," he says again.

Cas is upset, he is sort of - swishing around in there. Dean imagines Cas as a bigger Lightbulb, a shift of light along his bones, his organs, his every inner crevice.

_i promise that as soon as_

"Nope," says Dean, giddy with the fresh air and the solidity of the earth and the regular, countable thumping of his own heart. "Chill out for a bit, why don't you. Take a load off."

There is a trace of heat along his lower spine, down the backs of his legs.  _i could perhaps heal you in time_  Cas sounds hesitant.

"Well that would be cool," Dean agrees. "Since you're there. Mostly I just -"  _stay_  he tries.

Cas shifts again, and it's like his wings, his emotions are plain and clear in the way he turns inside Dean and  _nestles_  into the core of Dean.  _if you will have me_

 _yes_  says Dean, again.

He sits up and squints at the roadsign some sixty feet down the road. There is a moment where he thinks, bizarrely, that Purgatory had somehow stolen his ability to read, and then he realizes what he’s looking at. “Uh,” he says. “Cas?”

_it’s in russian_

_we are in kyrgyzstan_

“Is that a place we want to be?”

Brakes squeal behind him and he twists, tries to leap to his feet and only succeeds in flailing and half tipping over. Cas tries, belatedly, to assist but Dean’s legs only spasm, boots scraping along the ground.

There is a jeep, halted on the side of the road, and men in camo are spilling out of it, shouting.

“What does that sign say, Cas?” Dean asks, doing his best to look harmless. As disheveled and covered in blood and weird leviathan muck as he is, it’s probably a lost cause.

_it roughly translates to_

_no trespassing_

“Well, shit,” says Dean.

The men surround him, rifles pointed.

 _dean_ Cas sounds amused. _you’re forgetting something_

“Uh huh?” Dean asks, trying on a placating smile.

_you’re with me_

There is light. There is shouting. There is the crack of bullets and some dull, unimportant impacts along his ribs and left leg and then Cas unfolds his wings _through_ Dean, an ecstasy nearly too great to be borne. They are no longer on the roadside. They are in the glorious raging song of the universe, they are a waveform of divine intent collapsing toward a single point of time and space …

… a room. They are standing in a room. Dingy, grubby. Two beds. A duffle bag.

And, unfolding from a chair by the window, shock and joy breaking like dawn across his big, stupid, beautiful face…

“Hey, Sammy,” says Dean, catching his breath. “We're home.”

Fin.


End file.
